An extremely peripheral conflict

I don't correct people's usage or grammar on the internet (except when I'm working as an editor for an internet publication, where my job is to correct people's usage or grammar). If I really can't tell what they're saying, I might drop a private note seeking clarification. But in general I view it as uncouth, equivalent to phoning someone to say "I got your beautiful postcard in the mail and wanted to tell you immediately that the double L in parallel is the other one and you should be sure to remember that so you don't embarrass yourself in front of other people, which you probably already have. Ta!"

I'm a proponent of the notion that language changes over time. (As an aside, although I'm talking about usage here, the standardization of spelling has been in some ways wonderful for clear communication and in other ways awful for clear communication. We've already lost so many avenues of word-based expression by going to type.)

With words themselves, although it's obviously critical that we mean roughly the same thing by "pretty," even if we find different things pretty, there is a hegemonic power in declaring "this means this and only this," as when people try to enforce psychology's clinical definitions on terms that predate the field of psychology (e.g. depression), while speaking to people who are not psychologists, nor claiming to be. Or the zeal with which people proclaim the tomato is a fruit (botanical definition) when speaking to chefs or nutritionists (who use a gustatory definition, based on the sugar content rather than the item in question being a plant ovary).

So I leave it alone. I do not incline to the magical thinking side of semiotics where if I can get someone to call me the right word they will come to respect me.

Again, all this goes out the window when I'm working as an editor of prose. (With poetry, anything goes. It's poetry.) When I'm editing, I'm thorny and particular. I will shake you by the shoulders until I'm sure you're saying what you mean to say. It's absorbing and time consuming and I don't do it for free. (Unless you're Val. I'm more likely to say no to my mother than to Val. And I'm more confident she'll still like me afterward.) I don't even do it for myself when it's not important.

But my editor brain never really goes away, never really. It's more that I don't let it draw my mental resources, any more than I would voluntarily start dusting someone else's house unprompted. This is easy because I don't feel any moral high ground. It's just a skill I have. For comparison, it doesn't bug me when people sing off-key (I often listen to detuned music on purpose) and it only annoys me when people switch keys midway through a song because it throws off whatever harmonizing I was doing (whether aloud or in my head).

So my internal response to a lot of posts about the Israel-Palestine conflict is really not helpful. That response is: You can't say opposition to Israel's campaign in Gaza is anti-Semitic, because the Palestinans are also Semitic.

This is not a useful thing to say. It is also a losing battle. It is the inverse of Ciro's irritation when anyone calls him Anglo. (He is not in any way descended from the population of the British Isles.) It's definitely a violation of my stance against usage-policing, since the people who say "anti-semitic" definitely mean Jewish and are not speaking as linguists or ethnologists. Nor would getting them to use "the right word" make the conflict go away (whether on the ground, in synagogues, or on facebook).

But.

This is a significant and weird drain on my willpower that has been going on.