Most hated word: "Alternative"

[eldan]

When I was about 14, I started getting into "alternative" music, but within a couple of years I hated the label and started avoiding its use. The trigger was a conversation with a friend of my dad's, who shared my obsessive love of music but whose taste was dramatically different (barbershop and 1950s film soundtracks, I think). He was interested

Comments

[holyoutlaw]

Another reaction I have to "alternative" in this type of use comes from, I think, Tim Minchin: Do you know what they'd call "alternative medicine" if it worked? Medicine.

[eldan]

Heh, yeah that fits.

[chilimuffin]

good point (from my land of alternatives, alternative sexuality, alternative music, and most likely alternative cooking, alternative reading, alternative ambitions and alternative glassware).

There's a little part of my brain that also thinks of "alter" and "alternate" when I hear the word "alternative." So Wisconsin is an alternative state - all four seasons alternate in a given pattern. Yo-yo dieting is an alternative process. And if you just go with "alter," all change is alternative. By working as hard as you do to make the world a better place, you are, indeed, an alternative person. The fact that you bicycle everywhere, every day, all the time, unceasingly? Not alternative at all, I'm afraid.

[eldan]

In terms of what the words literally mean, you're absolutely right, but I think this is more about the baggage they carry.

[chilimuffin]

Time for you to invest in extra-large panniers for your bike, then ;)

[eldan]

Most of the time I only need one. But I alternate which I use so they wear more evenly.

[worst_witch]

There were two things that sprung to mind when I read this

[eldan]

Yes, to both of those. The first is really the thing I have in mind, and it frustrates me all the more because locally we have some good people working on framing but a failure to apply their lessons in a more general sense.