NASA has landed a research craft on Mars, and many are keen to see what mysteries it will uncover. Some are less interested, however, focusing instead on linguistics, taking offence to words like “colonization” and “exploration.”
Despite NASA having bigger fish to fry than the preferred snowflake vernacular, it seems that Walkowicz isn’t the only one worried about the ‘damage’ certain words could have. “Language is one of the ways in which we shape our social reality,”sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos from Australia’s Swinburne University also told Newsweek.
“The history of colonialism has taught us that there is no democratic way to colonize other lands,” Zevallos added. “It is about profit, and profit always marginalizes minorities.”
It is currently unclear what impact using the world ‘colonization’ will have on Mars’ minorities.
So far, some have argued that the following words should be banned: colonizing, settlement, frontier, and… exploring. If you can’t use the word ‘exploring’ to explain how NASA is ‘searching a previously unsearched new planet,’ then who even knows what terminology is snowflake-safe.
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