owens@gatech.UUCP (Gerald R. Owens) (04/04/84)
<*food*>
Incredible! I have never seen so much vocabularial rug-pulling
going on during all my days on the net, and it appears to be
done by those arguing *FOR* abortion. One would think that the
fanatic anti-abortionists would be doing such a thing, in their
crazed religious fervor :-) :-) !!!
Here are three instances:
1. Someone makes a sharp distinction between being human and
being a person, even though up to this time neither I nor
anyone else thought that there was a difference. Supposedly,
person=human+experience, and it is ok to kill a human, then,
but not a person.
2. I believe it was this same person who took the phrase,
"it is ok to abort the fetus if the mother's life is in danger",
ignored the fact that when it was made, the understanding was
that life meant the physical health and life of the mother, and
then proceeded to violate the preconditions and assumptions
under which it was made by making "life" mean the confort,
convenience, career and plans of the mother! Thus, something
meant to justify the use of self defense is then perverted
to justify the use of abortion to preserve one's bankbook!!
3. Now, something that is totally natural in the scheme of things,
pregnancy, has just been defined as rape! Oh boy! EVERYBODY
is now a RAPIST, guys and gals included! I wonder how this would
have gone over if the abortion debate was still in net.women!!
(sorry, your honor, but I was a rapist from birth!!)
I shall, however, give some credit where credit is due. a while
back, someone questioned whether being human was all that special,
so whether the fetus was human or not was irrelevant, since being
human wasn't anything special. Thankfully, I have not heard anything
like this since, so I presume that the neo-nazis have been beaten
back for the moment :-) :-).
However, this phenomenon of vocabularial rug pulling needs to be
addressed. It has the air of juvenile (sp?) irresponsibility, since
I saw it being used a lot in high school. A kid desiring to do Y will
deliberately use words that makes the adult giving permission think
he is giving permission to do X, when the kid knows he can warp his
words back to make it look as if permission was granted to do Y, when
that was not even in the mind of the adult in the first place.
In these cases, a subsidiary meaning which the context of the ORIGINAL
argument assumed did not apply is asserted to be the primary meaning,
and thus statements made in a restricted case are unjustifiably
streched to cover cases not addressed by the original argument.
(an implicit accusation is that the people who made the original
argument are inconsistent.) Well, we all are in an adult
context now, so I suggest arguing fairly and treating the English
language with respect, since it is the common property of all, and
that abuse of it is just going to make matters more confusing than
they already are.
Yours for an understandable language,
Gerald owens
Owens@gatech (csnet)