The term "atheist" has to go

And yup, no gods.

I came across a headline today: "Atheist family sues to get 'under God' stripped from Pledge of Allegiance". That sounds awful, doesn't it? I suspect that religious people can't even picture this "atheist family" referred to in the headline. It's a weird, out-of-focus boogeyman for them because the term "atheist" tells you nothing useful about a person. I talked about this in a recent post, but it bears repeating.

Transsexual v. transgender

Transgender symbol.

I noticed yesterday that several online newspapers referred to the first transgender lawmaker in Poland's parliament as a "transsexual".

I find this offensive and I imagine many transgender people do, too. The term "transgender" has been around for quite some time so why use an outdated term that has a shaky history? To me, the word transsexual reeks of early sensationalist headlines.

We don't call gay people "homosexuals" anymore. Only wingnuts do that. That's because "homosexual" is a clinical term. So is "transsexual". It is a term invented by doctors to describe a medical phenomenon they were seeing. Why go clinical? Doesn't it make sense to use the term most transgender people prefer?

(Mind you, I'm basing my judgement on comments made by the transgender people I've known. For all I know, there's a huge group who detest the term "transgender". I hope those concerned will chime in in the comments.)

This reminds me of the old days when we tried to convince the New York Times that "gay" wasn't a dirty word. They stuck with the homo terminology for so long! The change was way past its due date when they finally capitulated and went gay.

Transsexual indeed. The word is transgender. At least, I think so.

Album to CD to . . . what?

We used to say that a musical artist put out a new album. And then, when we didn't buy albums anymore, we spoke about an artist's latest CD. 

So what the heck do we say now? No one buys CDs anymore. We download our music. Is it the artist's latest digital burst?

What do we call this stuff? I know iTunes still calls them albums, but that just doesn't work for me anymore.

Hmmmm. I just bought Bon Iver's latest . . . what?