Bettersten Wade’s search for her adult son ended when she discovered that an officer had run him over — and without telling her, authorities buried him in a pauper’s field.
Bettersten Wade’s search for her adult son ended when she discovered that an officer had run him over — and without telling her, authorities buried him in a pauper’s field.
People like doing this, but the stigma remains with the thing, not the word. Until attitudes change, changing the word does nothing.
That’s not really how it works in every case. Take slurs for example, the stigma is very much in the word, and referring to people by the terms they prefer to be referred by instead of a slur definitely does more than nothing. There’s a reason why many groups and companies like to rebrand after a particularly devastating scandal, or why certain communities 9r ideologies use alternative terms for themselves, like fascists calling themselves identitarians, and so on. Words can have more influence on how we perceive something than you think.