oomis: That’s pretty much the case with 99% of harmful words (I think I touched on this in a different thread with LAB)- they may, in themselves, have no intrinsically insulting or harmful meaning, but the meaning given to them by the majority becomes pervasive and sticks. After all, it’s the majority of consumers who define what you say, not the writer. Which I think is one of the coolest things about language, but that’s not the point.
Think about curse words- actually, don’t think about curse words, but if you WERE to, half of them are just things from the Bible that we mention whenever we want in Hebrew because to us, what’s the problem? When something like that becomes a curse word in another context, the original meaning may as well just curl up and die, because it’s irrelevant. Context is king.
It’s like the whole thing “sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me”- um, words themselves are just combinations of letters, but if you know the context, the meanings behind them and how they were meant to be understood in the current setting, they can be painful. There are plenty of pejoratives for Jews- half of them don’t mean anything that offensive when you just pick apart the etymology. Would you get insulted if someone called you by one of them? At the last vote, that is an insult, so unless you want to reframe the word in the minds of every English speaker, that’s what it is right now.
And that’s why, IMO, using “yeneh machalah” is harmful. It’s not just a way of getting around saying the C word- it’s a new word, by common consensus, that sounds really creepy and threatening, a word that just inflates the thing it was meant to obscure until it’s now twice as terrifying.
ubiquitin: You obviously don’t know the boy at my relative’s dialysis center who has been on dialysis since he was three and will be for the rest of his life. The point, though, is that while obviously a global look at the situation is helpful, as it helps establish needed organizations like RCCS, on a case by case basis, which is what, quite honestly, scares me, there are plenty of diseases as harmful. I AM NOT DIMINISHING THE SUFFERING OF PEOPLE WITH CANCER. Cancer does NOT need to be the biggest, worst thing (I’m sure cancer sufferers agree with me) and there are other terrible diseases as well.
Which is a moot point, as why would ANY disease NEED a euphemism?