TIME Magazine Could Be Banning The Word ‘Feminist’ From The Internet, Done Screwed Up Big
Oh, TIME. You did not think this one though.
Did you know TIME Magazine still exists? It does, apparently, and it still runs those vaguely patronising quizzes asking you what newfangled Young People Trend you think should be outlawed, because TIME‘s target audience is a ninety-year-old man sitting on a porch with a shotgun in Georgia somewhere.
A staple of the genre is the yearly What Word Should Be Banished? poll, which started in 2012 and is loyally shared by every nitpicking grammar pedant English major you’ve forgotten to unfollow in your News feed. In the last three years it’s given readers a list of words they wish could be banned forever, and the winners — “LOL/OMG/WTF” in 2011, “YOLO” in 2012 and “twerk” in 2013 — are immediately erased from the worldwide Internet lexicon, never to be spoken or typed again. Such is the awesome power of TIME (see what I did there? I made a joke. The punchline is that TIME is irrelevant but the concept of ‘time’ is quite important really and they have the same name, it’s among my best work).
Alongside other Boomer-infuriating terms like “literally”, “basic”, “bae” and “said no one ever”, some savvy chap decided it’d be groovy to slot the word “feminist”in there, because that’s TIME‘s idea of being “edgy”.
Edgyyyyy.
The inclusion of the word is being ripped apart online, because anyone with more foresight than a Darwin Award winner could’ve seen why that might not be a great idea.
TIME magazine put the word ‘Feminist’ on a list of words that should be banned, prompting people to ask, “What is TIME magazine?”
— kelly oxford (@kellyoxford) November 12, 2014
A reminder from Amy Poehler for our friends at @TIME (Banning the word “feminist”? Seriously? http://t.co/LGd1cjzKm3) pic.twitter.com/YmOEt9iuT8 — Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) November 12, 2014
.@TIME Sorry, but the word “magazine” will disappear before “feminist” does.
— Rob Tannenbaum (@tannenbaumr) November 12, 2014
TIME fucked up doubly when known asshats 4Chan hijacked the poll, sending “feminist” rocketing to the top of the chart. The poll’s open for another week, but it’s already garnered almost half the total amount of votes by itself, leading to the distinct possibility that some poor TIME intern is going to have to write up a justification of why the word ‘feminist’ should be banned from usage in about a week’s time.
TIME correspondent Katy Steinmetz is fielding people’s dissatisfaction on Twitter, but the cat’s kinda already out of the bag.
@RebeccaSchinsky Please see the blurb for context. The inclusion is responding to trends in the media, not feminism itself. — Katy Steinmetz (@katysteinmetz) November 12, 2014
What a time to be alive.