One of the things about being very very out of touch with right wing consciousness is that one fails to realise the valences that are attached to certain words or phrases. One does not understand, by any means, that some random phrase or term one uses has very particular connotations in the limited world of right wing consciousness than they do in the everyday world.
My words are always linked to practicality, and have no other emotional context for me other than in terms of getting things done.
But right wingers I have encountered do not think we live in a practical world, but in a gendered world, primarily. So they are on the look out for words that have context within their own sphere of understanding.
Take the word, "intuition", for instance. I use it in the Jungian sense to mean the ability to register the existence of complex patterns in the world, and to know what those are.
A right winger, however, hearing that word coming from me is convinced it can only, ever, and with utterly no other possibility on this earth, mean "female hunch".
Unfortunate as it turns out to be, right wingers are always speaking and hearing a different language from ME.
1 comment:
Take the word 'socialism'. The right-winger will automatically think you are either a Stalinist or a weak-willed liberal member of the Labor Party, if you use that word in a positive way.
Lazy thinking patterns move the right-wing mind into many ruts. Stereotypes fitting into memorized dogmas are the conceptual outcomes of this impoverished attempt at wisdom.
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