Quote:
Originally Posted by tw
And Martin Luther King called them Negros. I never knew why the word changed. Or when. It just suddenly happened.
So, why is the word Eskimo wrong? What changed? Did those people become experts in accounting software?
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Meanwhile, cited is curiosity resulting in a logical question. What changed, when, and why?
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Sexobon's post gives some partial answers, but overall I've found answers to this sort of question to be fairly irrelevant. The only reason to want to know "why" is so we can better predict people's behavior in the future--but this is the kind of change that will always remain completely unpredictable. What's more, to believe you can identify a logical reason for it is to imply that some other language changes (or indeed, this one) may not be legitimate because they aren't logical. But that only denies reality. They aren't logical, and there is never a unified, uncontradicted reason why--but they *are* nevertheless real, with potentially real consequences.
Ironically, this means that the only logical thing to do is accept this sort of thing immediately and move on, because you'll never get the satisfaction of an answer so there's no point in wasting time searching for one. It's the logical person's equivalent of "God did it." Why did other people behave irrationally? Because they're other people.