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Old 06-30-2011, 03:10 PM   #141
dreadgeek
Power Femme

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Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
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She
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Married to a wonderful horse girl
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tapu View Post
Veering off-topic maybe, so I'll be brief, but: It's fairly well supported that there are judgments attached to each of the trait pairs/triads you mention. Taller women do better in business than short women. Someone's bias is behind that. Green-eyed women are tagged as jealous; redheads as fiery. To some degree you can never eradicate bias in anything. For whatever reason, humans consciously and unconsciously widely pair objectively unrelated traits.


[[I must tease you with this: Though Chomsky is in no way a prescriptive linguist, in the context I think it better to say, "Noam Chomsky (whom I generally disagree with)" >;-)
Congratulations, you've just moved to the top of my short list as my preferred editrix for my book! (joking) Oh and thank you, the funny thing is that I had originally typed 'whom' and then changed it.

Oh and while linguistics is not my speciality, my guess as to why we categorize is that it is an artifact of language--a spandrel if you will. If it's true, (and I'm almost certainly wrong on the particulars) I wonder if this was a forced move or if it is possible to have language and *not* engage in this kind of obsessive categorization.

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Aj
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