Maveric149 (Daniel Mayer) wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
This assumes that there's a reason for it to be in the title at all. Why is that? What else could "September 11, 2001 attack" mean? Titles are not required to be maximally complete.
Point taken. I was operating under the assumption that your reasoning was only that 'terrorist' should be blacklisted from the title because it is a "loaded term". 'September 11 Attack' is *at least* used as often as 'September 11 Terrorist Attack' (probably more so). Of course we would have the add '2001' to the title because of ambiguity reasons.
I /do/ think that the "loaded term" bit is relevant, but at a lesser level. (My immediately previous post explains this.) But no, that is not the main part of my reasoning.
WARNING! The rest of this post is mostly off-topic. (Or at least secondary to the main point of the thread.)
I remember once trying to convince you of this very thing: NPOV is primarily about article bodies, not titles, and titles need to be further determined through arbitrary conventions.
Nah - my opinions are always right for all time. ;) But I seriously don't remember holding such an opinion since it is not possible to have NPOV in titles because we have to choose just *one* title for any topic.
That was part of my point -- also the bit about titles becoming very long. Perhaps it was somebody else that I was arguing against and not you?
This came up back when Lir and I and Ec (to decreasing extents) wanted to use (for example) [[München]] as a title instead of [[Munich]]. And somebody claimed that to violate the common name convention would be POV. (Lir's argument /was/ basically a POV argument, on the grounds that [[Munich]] was somehow a "racist" name, but mine and Ec's position didn't rely on that characterisation.)
I'm not going to look this up, because it's pretty much irrelevant. Not only is it a historical digression in /this/ discussion, but it was a secondary point even in /that/ discussion! (Your argument was based squarely on the "common name" convention, not on any NPOV argument.)
So it's all IIRCWIPD ("if I remember correctly, which I probably don't"). ^_^
Since this is a digression, I won't go on about what slander the term "PC" is. Suffice it to say that no social movement called itself that.
Well there is no political action committee whose aim is PC that I am aware of, nor any groups that have exclusively pro-PC meetings. PC is more of a cross-group "movement" to change the English language (using the word "movement" very loosely). Perhaps "trend" would be more accurate (even though there are many counter trends to PC that help to negate its progress).
I will accept "trend", even "a trend found in some social movements". The term "politically correct" was invented by those movements' opponents, to denigrate this trend and thereby denigrate them.
-- Toby