inquiline

josh, 4 hours ago

@inquiline Oh that's fascinating. My inner cynic wants to see if the prevalence at all correlates with Citizens United v. FEC 😅 Police speak would be an even darker origin story.

I do wonder...

billseitz, 4 hours ago

@inquiline https://www.vox.com/2019/2/27/18243038/individual-1-cohen-trump-mueller

doriantaylor, 4 hours ago

@inquiline https://youtu.be/WD8aZV-Y8bE 🤔

athena, 4 hours ago

@inquiline I hate to admit this, but I've actually noticed myself saying it in work contexts because there are a lot of convos where I need to distinguish between people as individuals and groups of people where the group itself is the subject, not the individuals that make up the group.. so I would guess the use of "individual" might be common across any semi-disciplinary social fields that deal with people as both demographics and individuals? :///

riotmuffin, 4 hours ago

@inquiline i suspect that AI datasets include a lot of sources that use the type of language prosecutors and cops do, perhaps

skyfaller, 3 hours ago

@inquiline @billseitz Paul Simon wrote about a mean individual "Stranded in a Limousine" in like 1977. Could be prosecutorial and cop language, given the context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNbKF-S1JH8

But I feel like I've heard "individual" used in lyrics where it wasn't cop language, so maybe it's just from a different time and place and the cycle is coming back around?

eco_amandine, 4 hours ago

@inquiline I associate "individual" with "an individual of this species" or "we sampled n individuals for the research project". Not really related to humans/ persons.

inquiline, 3 hours ago

@beadsland Yeah, agree, these are instances where person/people works just fine and I think maybe there's an attempt to sound more academic or even "objective" about the "subject", maybe that's all it is

ETA: econ is a good lead tho, as the individual is the sovereign and unit of association in certain dominant paradigms. That could be an interesting subfield genealogical project, maybe

beadsland, 3 hours ago

@inquiline

Conjecture: police-speak usage swaps out perpetrator(s) and diminutive form thereof, under outside pressure against presumption of guilt, then genericizes to other policing.

Others replies here speak to usage of individual as object in relation to a subject group. My go to for long while has been person(s), or where salient member(s), except when specifically seeking to emphasize disassociation of interests from such group.

Ref another reply: smells of ungendered econ objectivity.

le, 3 hours ago

@inquiline i am in social science and I definitely have used it. I think it creeps in as a way to vary the language and words used to refer to a person but still be formal. there's a lot of external pressure be very cold and formal in some academic writing, and saying "someone" or even "a person" can feel too casual. This is mostly when worrying about marks or evaluation in a haughty university setting

skyfaller, 2 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

@inquiline @billseitz "Tenement Funster" by Queen (1974):

I've got a way with the girls on my block
Try my best be a real individual
And when we go down to Smokies and rock
They line up like it's some kind of ritual

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E2mjJvBKs8

I think it crops up as a kind of countercultural term, opposing the individual vs. society. (Now that I think about it, this could also be prosecutorial / cop language, reclaimed as a sign of rebellion.)

skyfaller, 2 hours ago

@inquiline @billseitz How about "Screaming Skin" by Blondie (1999)?

"I'm a multicellular individual
You're way out of proportion!
We've got the hemodynamic connection
Don't call me germ!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO7rT1RQujM
https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/77464/

Frankly I have no idea what this song is about, so I can't really speculate as to what the source of "individual" is here. Is it just contrasting the concept of "individual" with being multicellular & therefore made of a vast multitude of parts? Is it medical?

blogdiva, 1 hour ago

@inquiline it’s 90s Randian wanker business-speak that has oozed and corroded rhetoric in the last 30 or so years.

ryanrandall, 31 minutes ago

@inquiline @billseitz

My (lacking citations, but lived/remembered experience) perspective is that I first noticed it years ago in cop / legal speak, which is one of the few places where "person" cannot be a simple synonym for "individual." (i.e. "They had the drugs on their person" vs "They had the drugs on their individual [nonsense!]")

From there, it seeped into common usage through sports reporting, and then other news more generally. To my ears the usage always felt deeply unnatural, like the sports reporters had been coached to say "individual" on air in order to not accidentally imply or outright say decidedly racist things.

Then, from there, people much younger than I seem to have taken it up as an apparently "inclusive" way of referring to other folks.

I feel it's anti-social, alienating, & mostly dehumanizing. But even the lefty younger folks I know use it thinking that they're respecting individuality, rather than doing Zombie Reagan's work of breaking social bonds.

kissane, 5 hours ago

What we lack is consistent evidence of large-scale effects across communities, which is understandable even given all the evidence that high-filtration masks work very well, because the variables are nightmarishly complex. That gap has given motivated reasoners license to demand that everyone else accept their rejection of a solid and deep body of evidence for mask efficacy.

I don’t think it’s beyond the bounds of civility to sharply disagree with that whole maneuver.

eom

inquiline, 7 hours ago

@richpuchalsky That used to work for me, in fact be my primary strategy. However more recently my indolence and torpor have assumed new proportions

seachanger, 1 hour ago

@inquiline @Adam_Cadmon1 few more valuable concepts than the quadrant containing what you don’t know you don’t know MASTODON

seachanger, 1 hour ago

@inquiline @Adam_Cadmon1 sadly eugen’s too busy hawkin stuffies to retoot smh