Sophistry and Illusion: Culture versus Tradition, Custom, Ethnicity

It has been the fashion for more than a generation now to refer to Ethnically different groups of people outside your own, as a different "Culture".

Now, the traditions, the customs, the ethnicity of a people group (especially when referring to those minority immigrants and asylum seekers/refugees pouring into our better countries) are instead lumped under the malapropist term "culture".

Examples:

- they don't eat pork, it's their culture
- they slit the goat's throat, it's their culture.
- they have arranged marriages, it's part of their culture.
- they marry children to old men, it's a cultural thing.
- some cultures don't look you in the eye, it's rude.
- Melbourne is a multi-cutural society.
- there are socio-cultural aspects at play in youth crime.
- Just because someone comes from another culture, doesn't mean we can be racist.

None of these sentences is using the term "culture" or "cultural" in the common use of intellectuals and thinker and students of sociology, anthropology, politics and other sciences that are concerned with people groups and their distinct behaviours.

The word Culture refers to development, change, improvement, growth. But it is used to describe tradition, custom, ethnicity.

The practise of stoning adulteress women to death, the throwing of acid into the faces of unveiled girls, selling off daughters to old men, arranging marriages of children to children with no regard for their own view, is not cultural in any sense, more accurately the opposite sense.

These practises are traditonal, NOT cultural. They are customary, they are socio-behavioural aspects of an ethnic group.

Up until recently (before mass immigration caused by terrorism and the Internet, cheap flights and the boat-people trafficking industry) the sentences above would have not used the term culture, but the terms, Tradition, Custom and Ethnicity.

It is odd that these "correct" or at least more accurate and historically consistent terms, have now almost become obsolete.

This is a typical malaproposim from the ignorant and uneducated, and easily fooled, easily lead, general public.

Teachers, educated parents, politicians, academics, philosophers, scientists are all to blame for not educating themselves and then correcting the general public misuse of discrete linguistic symbols conserved to express important concepts and meanings.

Should we intellectuals put up with this? Should we allow our beautiful, intelligent language to be hi-jacked by the dumbarse masses?

This use is detrimental to intellectual discussion, especially in the public arena, and the misue and misunderstanding of key sociological terms like these will create more problems than that field of study and policy has already.

So let's get our language right.

As we learned know already, there is no Divine Dictionary. The meaning of words is NOT permanent and written in stone by a council of wise Sages.

Words evolve. However, meanings do NOT.

So even if you take a word away and use it for some other meaning, the meaning left behind will remain and still need to be expressed by the symbols of langauge.

How about this:

Instead of that, why don't we educated step in, call out the mistake, and return the word to its original owner, and in a public way?

That's what We are doing, in our own cliques and places of social engagement.

Culture = Growth, NOT Tradition

THIS IS NOT CULTURAL!

THIS IS NOT CULTURAL!