LogFAQs > #972315093

GeraldDarko posted...

Hmm... that should have been painfully obvious. I'll accept the dunce cap for that. I can see adding something to make it grammatically correct. I'm still a bit stuck on there being so many. Gender and sexual identity are individualistic. I feel like many want to have their individualism recognized, which is all well and good, but not feasible.

Compare and contrast with competing forms of media formatsJPEG, BMP, PNG, WebP, MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC.... When you give communities of people the freedom to come up with their own ways of doing things, and there isn't any authority or driving market force that naturally narrows these competing options down (think Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD where hardware compatibility and production cost drive the need for a consensus industry standard), you end up with lots of options.

The other important thing to keep in mind is that these terms mostly formed within separate communities with differing cultures and their crossover usage, while seemingly meaningless to us, might have significance to those members of that community wishing to identify themselves to other members. Someone with a PhD may prefer to be referred to as "Doctor" because it identifies that they are part of the academic community. Someone who is a fan of a certain band might wear a t-shirt with the band's logo. And just because the differences are not obvious to those of us outside the community does not mean they do not exist. A member of the US Marine Corps, for example, would likely strongly object to being called "soldier" despite an outsider not seeing a meaningful difference between the two.