1 Disclaimer
This continues some thoughts from a previous post1.
I decided not cite the whatisabait (more on that term below) arguments whether text or video. I just don't want to associate my blog with them directly.
2 Titles, addresses, honourifics, etc
Please note, I will use the word title mean all of these, for lack of my own better understanding.
Before I get to the main topic I want to add this:
In my previous post I mentioned that "San" might work as a good replacement in English for Ms, Mr, etc. At the time of writing I explicitly had thought of the Japanese origin of the word. But a day or two later it occurred to me that many Romance Languages already use that for what English already has for Saint or St. So to avoid that possible ambiguity I take back "San" as a recommendation, at least for a prefix position title. However, my recommendation for an abstract or general title remains.
And now the main topic…
3 All the "what is a…" clickbait
I don't remember when I started seeing these, but "what is a woman" and the mostly YouTuber clickbait is just a bunch of trash. Like before, I'll appeal to the software engineers out there, but anyone who has ever had to refactor their code already knows that once something has been defined, if something new gets added and there's a conflict, it doesn't mean the original doesn't work. You just update the logic, bump the version, and move on. And so I call all of this clickbait because that's what it is, unless for some case someone didn't ever actually know. Hello Data, and now we're back to appealing to Trekkies as I did in the previous post.
And just like software, it's never really done. People freaked out about "what is a planet" a few years ago. Poor Pluto. My main gripe with all of that relating to my tendency to want to call all exoplanets also planets. Or maybe also that gas giants and Earth/Venus/Mercury rocks all planets. Those don't matter in terms of communication. But for the clickbait, these people are just trying to disrupt or act like experts on something they either know nothing about or have no rational process to address their own thoughts other than cashing in on that sweet monetization.
So what is a planet? Planets orbit a star, clears its own orbit, blah blah. So why not Pluto? Not big enough. Even NASA writes that "This seemingly simple question doesn't have a simple answer". Though, take note that in this case, NASA asks "What is a Planet?" with sincerity and with an actual answer2.
4 Okay but what is a woman?
For my own working definition, based on what I know and what I wrote about last time, "woman" is currently the gender normatively associated with female humans. So by contrast, "man" or what I dubbed "karlman" is the gender normatively associated with male humans. From that I imply that gender does not equate to sex. So what is sex? It's something related to reproduction and/or sexual preference. And whether or not I'm wrong, I'm going to stop there because my point is that defining things works like this for anything. And I could have picked anything, but planets just seemed like the most recent thing that was big in the news media where folks either actually had trouble accepting the definition or where it had some political reason.
I suppose instead of planets I could have also brought up racism, fascism, assault rifles, or machine guns. Great, now I've appealed to "both" sides.
5 Whatisabait
The insincere "what is a" argument feels like a close cousin to whataboutism. I think coining a term might be a good idea. "Whatisabait" feels odd to me, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, just new. Those asking "what is a" (or perhaps sometimes just "what is") don't actually care about the answer. They're usually trying to discredit some else's thoughts by pointing out absurdities.