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  • josefjk@mastodon.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 10:19 AM

    it's interesting how it's rhetorically impossible to convey a difference between something being bad (1: evil, harmful, wrong, problem) with something being bad (2: crappy, stupid, poor-quality, non-functional, useless). if you say something is bad2 but not bad1, it looks like you're trying to play down its real flaws by emphasising harmlessness. if you say a person is bad1 but not bad2, it looks like you respect their aptitude, and are thus defending a toxic person. so you have to conflate them

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  • josefjk@mastodon.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 10:29 AM

    for example. if i say "the owner of a major social network website, among many other actions and qualities i consider morally reprehensible, uses immense power and wealth to attempt to control and harm others, and is capable of understanding and communicating, at a broad level, the operation and characteristics of rocket engines" it will *always* sound like i'm saying the guy is actually smart and cool and epic. the only way you can convey your lack of respect for the guy is to call him a dunce

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  • hermitalive@interlace.space
    Oct 13, 2026, 11:22 AM

    @jk if you say someone is evil and incompetent people will say "oh how convenient that you think they're both, you just pretend they're incompetent because you hate them!"

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  • Lazy B0ylazyb0y@mastodon.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 11:38 AM

    @alive

    seems you both found the reason why so many bad OR incompetent people get free rides to the top of any organization…

    @jk

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  • ɗ𐐩ʃƕρʋdeshipu@fosstodon.org
    Oct 13, 2026, 12:34 PM

    @jk I don't know. I recently had a conversation with another speaker of a Slavic language about how hard it is to translate the word "evil" from English. For example, if you translate "evil wizard" word-by-word to Polish, you either get "angry magician" or "inept magician", which doesn't quite convey the same thing. The person suggested using words like "diabolic", I leaned more towards "dark", but the problem is there because we don't really have that concept in the culture.

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  • Nora Dimitrijevićd10c@hachyderm.io
    Oct 13, 2026, 1:11 PM

    @jk In a similar vein, a fedizen was remarking recently that “fascist boot-licker” is ambiguous as to whether the boot wearer or the boot licker is a fascist. It seems to me that conflation of the two is rhetorically compelled, because in a language game where you’re accusing someone of being one, you don’t score extra points by excluding the other. A maximalist moral judgment is the point.

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  • josefjk@mastodon.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 1:14 PM

    @d10c all this grammatical trouble would be resolved if we just used s-expressions

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  • CabbidgesTheDailyBurble@mastodon.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 4:58 PM

    @jk And then there's bad as in "rotten/putrid" ie bad apple, bad meat, so now there's three horribles in English rolled into one word, sorry to add to the chaos.
    "This milk has gone bad" = the milk is neither evil nor incompetent, it's possibly on it's way to being cheese - but maybe it's too far along it's journey back to the earth.
    English is a language of flummery and fluff and wordplay (see Shakespeare), it's not very good at description, observation nor truth.

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