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hyporational comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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Comments (893)
What's wrong with wimp? Wuss might work too if the etymology is obscure enough to people.
I didn't find your comment offensive and pretty much agreed with it, but might care if other people did.
"Wimp" and "wuss" have the connotations of weakness in conflict with other men, in personal, or at best, professional, circumstances. "Pussy" has the connotation (among others) of weakness in relationship power dynamics, which your suggestions do not.
If these indeed are the usual distinctions in connotation, thanks for the clarification. Some kind of a connotational dictionary would be nice, but I suppose the contents might change quite rapidly.
A strange idea, but not necessarily a bad one. I am intrigued.
How well does http://www.urbandictionary.com/ fit?
I use it quite often and would recommend it to others, but don't have the impression that it's accurate considering how illiterate and random many of the authors seem to be.
Connotation is tricky enough that it's dangerous to presume any single source is accurate. Submitted definitions of poor average quality aren't a fatal problem, so long as the people who vote, in aggregate, can distinguish useful information from garbage.
Moreover, connotations often depend on specific subcultures. In some connotations get inverted (e.g. "punk").
FWIW, I disagree with this. In my experience, they are synonyms, or the offensive one is a more intense verison of the other two. But I don't see them as applying to different contexts.
SaidA's answer is likely better than the explanation I could come up with. Those words cannot stand alone to convey the same meaning. (Tangentally, they are also frankly much more sexist and presumptively gender normative in practical usage than the term I used.)
There is also the critical desiratum that this kind of heuristic needs to be simple. It can't be obfuscated behind a sentence of political correctness if it is to be used as the first step in a diagnostic flowchart. There needs to be a single word that has precisely the connotations that 'pussy' has. If there was another word that meant the same thing then I would be eager to use it. However the kind of people most inclined to suppress that term tend to be the same kind of people who don't want there to be a word for the concept at all because they find any bare bones and literal discussion of social reality to be uncouth.
This is the kind of situation where I would be (and in the past have been) reasonably content to submit to the will of the participants 'write off' lesswrong as a place where useful conversation cannot occur but not willing to distort the discussion to appease social politics. I happen to think it's an error to learn "My problem is that I don't lie enough" when the explanation "I was being a pussy" fits perfectly but it isn't a battle I am willing to spend social capital to fight.