I am looking for a name for an idea that I have for a website. It is a niche hobby, but there is a greek word for it that most people don’t know. Lets say its a book club and the word was Bibliophile or a music club called Melophile.
Would you, if you did not know the meaning, think of it as something sexual, or maybe even something bad? I am nervous that users might relate it to pedophile even though that is just one of, (but maybe best known) philias there are
It really depends. I think -phile tends to make me think non-sexual, and -philia makes me think sexual. Probably just because of how the words are used.
People tend to be willing to describe themselves as an x-phile, but psychological or legal literature are more likely to say something like “a person with x-philia” or “displaying traits of x-philia”.
I suspect the part with descriptions in literature is due to it being in a 3rd person. There seems to be a recent-ish trend though for people to refer to themselves in a ‘person who has X’ sense though to separate the person from the condition so maybe that changes.
Person First language. “A person with autism” means we use the word for the diagnosis, rather than the word for a diagnosed person (e.g., “autist”? Was that ever a real word?).
That’s the phrase I was looking for.
I’m pretty sure autist as a single word description was more a 4chan thing, but autistic person has been pretty common use.
In autistic online communities, we tend to refer to ourselves as autists. Sometimes I call myself “an autistic”.
It doesn’t bother me, personally. And it seems to not bother the other autistic people I’ve interacted with.