Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of a LeftPodcast.

This is a sample of our recent bonus episode every couple of weeks or so, our crew of researchers,

Amanda and myself get together for a roundtable discussion.

So here's a few minutes for free so you can see what all the fuss is about.

I'm going to jump to this episode's segment of Words Matter, the book I'm continuing to read through

and pulling gems from.

And you're talking about the imaginary ideas that we put on groups of people, which is exactly what we are talking about today.

In the form of what I'm going to describe by mangling the English language terribly as verbanowning.

So to verbanown is to turn people into nouns, to noun them.

And so this is done sort of instead of using adjectives, instead of describing individual aspects of a person.

If you noun them, you turn them into a member of a group, then that brings a lot of baggage with it, naturally, that shouldn't necessarily be there.

So from the book it says, it suggested that saying, quote, Maria is Mexican, brings with it fewer stereotypes and assumptions,

then saying Maria is a Mexican, and also points out that racial and ethnic slurs are nouns rather than adjectives.

Nominal labels and categorization tend to suggest clusters of properties that make the category cohere, whereas a description simply describes a single property and does not necessarily suggest that any particular other properties might also hold of the individual so described.

And the difference, I mean, like I've never been a grammar nerd to any extent, and I'm going to harken back to something my brother said a month or two ago, or I don't remember when, but he just pointed out that grammar is not the rules that our language lives by grammar is an attempt to describe the natural way our language works.

And I don't know that I could have consciously told you that Maria is Mexican, the word Mexican is an adjective and Maria is a Mexican means that Mexican becomes a noun, like maybe I could have told you that, but that's not what would have popped to mind necessarily, but I still would have had the like very instant sort of visceral understanding of the difference between those two.

People have thoughts on that we talked about this, the instant like example that came up was when Trump said there's my black like that and no matter what you think that that just has like a like it hits you some way like, oh, what the hell is he saying.

But you know, because you have to assume he has a whole bunch of ideas about what being black means that he is that person is a black not that person is a black person that was the it was very clarifying because.

A word can become a slur only if it has so much weight behind it like not if it's just like one aspect of someone if it's the entirety of their being then it's a slur and that makes a whole lot of sense.

Yeah, I mean, I can think as soon as Jay said this, you start thinking about all these examples right is Jewish versus is ed Jew depending on how you say that it can definitely come off wrong is gay versus is a gay I mean like there's.

So many examples like and you know, if I quoted that you know to you you know who and what their political beliefs are.

Is that it as well yeah, and so the next segment goes on to talk about sort of the nature of grammar and how we actually do this completely naturally without any thought it explains.

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