It鈥檚 been a while since I鈥檝e visited the pet peeve vault, but one thing has really been bugging me lately. I will get to that in a minute, but first a lesser peeve, but an extremely annoying one, the phrase 鈥榓lso too.鈥�
I can see how in the heat of the moment someone might stumble on this, but when people use it exclusively, probably simply from habit, it is very irritating. I won鈥檛 name names because you know who you are radio host Mike Wilson and federal transportation minister Lisa Raitt.
On the peeviness scale, however, 鈥榓lso too鈥� is minor compared to the term 鈥榟ater.鈥�
It does not help, of course, that Taylor Swift, one of the biggest pop stars in world right now has a hit song that features the lines: 鈥淗aters gonna hate hate hate hate hate. Baby, I鈥檓 just gonna shake shake shake shake shake. I shake it off, shake it off.
I am not disputing that there are actual haters out there, but this term has gone out of control.
This has a lot to do with the Internet. People can say pretty much whatever they want and hind behind the anonymity of the web. And some people are extremely vitriolic.
It has become a catch all, however, to label numerous behaviours. Let鈥檚 start with haters. A true hater is someone like the followers of the Westboro Baptist Church, famous for their 鈥淕od Hates Fags鈥� campaign. They despise America, because America condones what they view as evil and sinful. For that reason, they have been known to picket the funerals of dead soldiers because, they say, the armed forces are fighting to defend America and therefore evil and sin.
Those, are true haters.
I think it is extremely important to make these distinctions. Trolls, for example, like to lurk around social media pages and posts to disrupt discussions with provocative statements designed to get a rise out of others. Some of them may be haters, but mostly they are just attention seekers and mischief makers. Calling them haters just gives them more power.
Where the term becomes really problematic, however, is when it is used to shut down, or attempt to shut down, legitimate criticism. I鈥檝e written before about Vani Hari, the self-styled 鈥淔ood Babe鈥� who passes herself off as an expert, but knows less than nothing about nutrition and science. Yes, you can know less than nothing if you spread information that is simply wrong as expertise.
Giving advice to air travellers, she once wrote: 鈥淲hen your body is in the air, at a seriously high altitude, your body under goes some serious pressure. Just think about it鈥擜irplanes thrive in places we don鈥檛. You are traveling in a pressurized cabin, and when your body is pressurized, it gets really compressed! Compression leads to all sorts of issues. First off your body鈥檚 digestive organs start to shrink, taxing your ability to digest large quantities of food. Secondly, this compression reduces the ability for your body to normally circulate blood through your blood vessels.鈥�
This is patently absurd and demonstrates this woman has a complete lack of logical thinking capacity. Furthermore, once she comes to these ridiculous conclusions by 鈥渏ust thinking about it鈥� she passes them along as if they are fact, without ever once trying to verify them.
Anybody who points these things out, though, in the popular vernacular of the day, is a hater. It would be a聽 dangerous thing indeed if calling out charlatans and purveyors of non-evidence-based advice can be dismissed with a simple epithet.
If disagreeing with one another is cause to be labelled such, then everyone is a hater.
