this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Also, even if "people with job X" caught on, that wouldn't actually achieve anything. The impression or image in your head that you get when you hear "people who work in a factory" vs. "factory workers" is the same, even if the wording deliberately makes reference to people.
I appreciate what the intention is behind it, just like with "people with disabilities" vs. "disabled people", but it doesn't address the societal issues that result in the actual discrimination/problematic views.
This is more of a theoretical argument, but from a linguistic perspective there's a common misconception that language shapes our perception of reality, when in fact it's the other way round. If you talk about subject X which is looked down on for whatever reason, the commonly used word for it can take on a derogatory tone, which leads to well-meaning people using a more positive word. This is commonly seen with words for women in patriarchal societies, and it leads to a cycle of neutral words becoming derogatory and polite words becoming the new standard, until that word becomes derogatory and has to be replaced in turn. None of this is to say we shouldn't be careful with the language we use, and in fact it's a good way of signalling respect, but I just want to highlight that adopting new terminology is itself won't achieve much.