currently thinking
can there ever be an entirely untrue stereotype?
later on
And when it comes down to it, I mean really, words are just stereotypes, too. The act of naming, of representing something - it anchors a thing/person/group/concept to a set of characteristics (read: a definition) and a corresponding word (read: a stereotype). We stereotype wooden things with four legs and a top as table; we stereotype a creature with two legs, two arms and a face like ours as human. This is why things that push the edge of our stereotype boundaries are disconcerting: upended boxes as tables ("that's not a table, that's a box"); or more seriously, that repressed disgust at mangled human faces, mangled limbs, mental patients that we struggle to call human. Artificial intelligence. Fetuses. Things that hover on the cusp of disorder.
Because words, like stereotypes, try to harness the world into order. We've an inherent need to categorize. And it's in this way, I realize, that stereotypes can never be entirely untrue: because like everything else they're temporal. If enough things start to emerge on the edges of the stereotype, we reorder. It takes time (the world isn't flat - that characteristic was forced out over a couple of centuries), but it seems we move towards an increasingly accurate representation of everything: an eschatology of total naming. Stereotypes are interims, what we make do with in lieu of perfect representation. I mean, that's the meaning of a stereotype, right? that it's, you know, mostly true?
or is that just a stereotype, too? :)