It’s been a while since I’ve 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 ‘also too.’
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’t name names because you know who you are radio host Mike Wilson and federal transportation minister Lisa Raitt.
On the peeviness scale, however, ‘also too’ is minor compared to the term ‘hater.’
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: “Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate. Baby, I’m 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’s start with haters. A true hater is someone like the followers of the Westboro Baptist Church, famous for their “God Hates Fags” 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’ve written before about Vani Hari, the self-styled “Food Babe” 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: “When your body is in the air, at a seriously high altitude, your body under goes some serious pressure. Just think about it—Airplanes thrive in places we don’t. 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’s 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.”
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 “just thinking about it” 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 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.
