Max Alexander

The American television show Rick and Morty, an animated science fiction sitcom, critiques speciesism in the context of bleak existentialist philosophy. Though the show focuses primarily on human characters, it also depicts various forms of artificial sentience, such as robots or clones, undergoing existential crises. It explicitly effaces any distinction between human sentience and artificial sentience, forcefully treating all sentient life with an equivalent respect (or disrespect). The show also problematizes human speciesism in relationship to terrestrial and extra-terrestrial life.

When the language-dialect dichotomy first emerged in the early modern period, several scholars devised terminological alternatives, particularly for the subordinate lower half of the dichotomy. This article examines a series of terminological alternatives in their social and linguistic contexts, considering terms from the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic linguistic zones. Our case studies suggest that there were two main reasons for coining neologisms, or for devising new meanings for existing words. Some scholars sought terms with stronger pejorative connotations, others acted from language purism. Pejorative neologisms generally proved unsuccessful, but several purist neologisms endured.