Androcentrism pertains to a tendency to view humanness through the lens of masculinity. This tendency is reflected in language, in which there is ample evidence that words used to represent all people are either grammatically or semantically biased to represent predominantly men. In this chapter, we describe the most overt example of androcentrism in language, that is: the (false) masculine generic. It is the most prominent example of androcentric language in which grammatically masculine words are used. They are aimed to represent everyone, regardless of their gender, yet discriminatory effects of such language are common. We then describe the current state of knowledge regarding reformatory attempts to change language that first focused on women, but then expanded to include diverse gender expressions. We also present considerations of the effectiveness of such changes. Finally, we review evidence that points out both cognitive and attitude-based obstacles in introducing changes in language and how these obstacles were addressed in intervention studies aimed at promoting inclusive language.
In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of populism as viewed through the lens of political pragmatism and my pragmatist concept of non-consensual democracy. My argument takes its starting point from a critique of the currently dominant approach in which populism is primarily described as a threat to liberal-democratic institutions. While such an assessment of populism is legitimate, it is also incomplete since it fails to explain why populist mobilizations prove to be convincing to the public. I argue that populism should also be regarded as an expression of real deficits of liberal democracy, including an enfeeblement of representation, a yawning gap between institutional politics and everyday experience, a crisis of representation, and the reduction of conflict to a technocratically managed consensus. In the first part, I build on John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and also Mikhail Bakhtin to outline the pragmatist understanding of politics as rooted in practices of everyday life. In the second part, I discuss my idea of non-consensual democracy, which proposes an alternative to both the deliberative model of consensus and the agonistic affirmation of conflict. In the third part, I draw a distinction between the common good and common interests to show that pragmatism furnishes us with a language capable of capturing democratic integration without recourse to the notion of community. This promotes construing populism as both a symptom and a challenge because while it reveals actual failings of liberal democracy, it responds to them in an anti-pluralist manner. Thus, the democratic response must not come down to a condemnation of populism; instead, democratic institutions must be restructured to accommodate permanent disagreement,
conflicts of interest, and non-consensual dialogue.
The purpose of this study is to examine folk-etymology-like descriptions referencing metaphorical bug names in Korean popular science texts. This can be seen as a device for communicating scientific knowledge. In such conceptualizations language itself is used as a resource for common-sense knowledge. Thus, bug names can serve as a type of boundary objects, that is, entities used for facilitating cooperation between two or more social worlds as suggested by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer. The act of creating a folk-etymological narrative to fulfil the goal of communicating science can be understood as putting to use a boundary object. This study adopts a broad understanding of folk etymology as synchronic conceptualization of a linguistic expression. The gathered linguistic material contains descriptions sourced from 26 Korean popular science texts. The metaphorical components of the zoonyms are examined in terms of their morphological and lexical traits. The latter part of the analysis showcases instances of metaphorical conceptualization of the names, some of them culture-specific. In the concluding section of this study metaphorical bug names in Korean popular science texts are discussed in terms of their role as boundary objects and in the context of models of science communication.
