Extirpatory
Short and Pithy Ways to Talk about the Birth Collapse
We have plenty of short pithy words, memes, and images for collapse and decay. Instantly recognizable. High art and low art.
There is an ongoing human extinction event, lineages are dying out all over . . .
Human Colony Collapse Disorder
Today’s transmission has two messages. You are in the middle of an unprecedented human extinction event. Don’t worry, be happy.
. . . and we don’t have a term for it.
You don’t have to believe in a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to realize that concepts with easy shorthand references are much easier to think about and discuss.
The lack of those easy shorthand references is a real demerit for those of us who don’t want to see the human tree radically pruned. Remedying this lack is the subject of today’s transmission.
Existing Terms
Birth Dearth – good. Memorable. It applies to society wide problems though, not to individuals. Talking exclusively about birth dearth casts the problem as purely a society-wide problem and ignores the thousands of individual lineages who are perishing and the millions of individuals who are being steered away from the joys of offspring. “Birth dearth” is an eat-your-vegetables global warming type of term.
Bare branches – also good. Less well known. Usually refers solely to Asian young men without a realistic hope of marriage and offspring, so it doesn’t really capture the scope of the problem. Useful but limited. See also incel.
Wine aunt – powerful, instantly recognizable term. Its weakness is that it implies the rest of the family is ongoing, whereas many wine aunts aren’t wine aunts because they don’t have nieces or nephews. They are wine nothings. Pretty pejorative, not always a bad thing.
New or Repurposed Terms
The steaders have been talking it over.
I need a new word that is functionally similar to "fatal" but instead of meaning will end a life, it means will end a lineage. Her girlboss attitude and affection for her so called furbabies would prove nu-fatal. The man had a nu-fatally large collection of funkopops. The decadence of so many patrician families proved to be nu-fatal.
"Terminal" also answers to this but has the same flaw.
contradynastic
dispossessive
autocidal
lineacide
ancesthalt
Extirpatory
antiracist
LOL.
Dynasticidal
Germicidal
You're gonna need degrees as well
Personally extirpatory - you have siblings with issue
Filially extirpatory - you have aunts and uncles with issue
Dynastically extirpatory - your grandfather will have no grandchildren
Extirpatory is good.
Neologism: extinctive
I like dwindle as a noun. Nice echoes of swindle.
Girl boss is a dwindle.
Lineage-ending has a nice ring to it.
Self-culling
There’s probably a Latin word for ending a bloodline but I’d coin “genofatal”
Genofatal in the first degree- you. Second degree: Parents line ends Third degree: Grandparents line ends Etc
Wouldn't the deliberate non-transmission of one's genes literally be a genocide?
Yes but it’s already taken
Genicide Gensicide
Autocull
A woman who made her kids trans is also extirpatory.
Your plans for a walkable neighborhood aren’t family friendly. It looks like a dwindle.
No more extirpatory legislation.
Of these, we like extirpatory the best. Extinctive perhaps also. Dwindle is not good as as a noun; just use it in its already established sense of a people getting fewer and fewer.
Many of these terms are good but are too close to existing terms with lots of cultural strength. Gens-icide, for example. Line-acide has possibilities.
What terms do you like? There doesn’t have to be just one. An ecosystem of easy reference terms and phrases in high and low registers is what we desire.
We’ll know we are winning when the terms are salient enough that normal people have to address them. “We aren’t planning on having kids just yet. We know that sounds extinctive but we plan on having some eventually, I swear.”
We’ll know we are winning when one of those trashmags like the Daily Beast runs a headline, “Why Its OK to Extirpatory.”
Other Memes
Talk about people who are childless by choice as mentally infertile or mentally barren.
Accuse them of practicing eugenics.
Tell them its such a white person thing to do.
Images
Images are more powerful and their lack is deeply felt. Please post/link all the good options you can think of.
Some mediocre attempts below
You are right, this is badly needed. Western civilization has been committing suicide and the culture is to busy being entertained to death to care. If our broken culture cared, these words would already exist.