"Innocuous" slurs

This is our main forum. Here, anything related to languages and linguistics can be discussed.

Moderator:Forum Administrators

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:
Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-04-20, 3:13

I think it's part of the same dynamic, and also, I think it may be important in a Brazilian context that the Romani language died out in Spain and Portugal a fairly long time ago. I think it's very possible that people who no longer speak Romani may also adopt the same words for themselves that non-Roma (or non-Ciganos or non-Gitanos) use and that this practice has continued in the Americas as well, even though there are also Roma in the Americas (including in Brazil, if I remember correctly) who do speak Romani.

User avatar
mōdgethanc
Posts:10890
Joined:2010-03-20, 5:27
Gender:male
Location:Toronto
Country:CACanada (Canada)

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby mōdgethanc » 2022-04-20, 8:48

In English the word "Gypsy", when capitalized, does at least look like the name of an ethnic group (albeit one with a wrong etymology). Having it lowercase as "gypsy" makes it look like it means the senses of the word that are barely connected to the Romani or their culture but come from a romanticized stereotype of them as travelling and living a "free-spirited" "bohemian" lifestyle.

While on this topic, another one about Jews is, well, the word "Jew". When used as a noun, it's fine most of the time. ("He is a Jew" sounds neutral to me at least.) But using "Jew" as an adjective sounds derogatory and brings to mind stereotypes about Jews like, again, being greedy and miserly. "A Jewish lawyer" is fine; "a Jew lawyer" sounds bad.

Even still there are some who feel that calling someone "a Jew" sounds bad and it should be "Jewish", but to me they seem like the same thing. But there is a distinction somewhat like that with African-Americans: calling them "blacks" is a bit unusual but not that offensive, whereas "the blacks" sounds very bad, like it's casting them as an "other".

"More and more blacks in America today are going to college." This seems fairly neutral to me; I wouldn't think it to be out of place in a newspaper headline.
"The problem with the blacks is that it's their culture." Upon hearing this I wouldn't be shocked to hear an n-bomb being dropped soon afterward.

Another word where slight differences in grammar make a big difference in meaning is the word "queer" which I brought up in my last post. Saying someone is queer, meaning LGBT+, sounds neutral to me and most of my age group; it would be normal in my social circles to use the word this way without batting an eye. But saying someone is "a queer" is something only bigots would say. When using it for more than one person, "they're queer" seems fine, but pluralizing it like "they're queers" also feels kind of suss. In this case it's, interestingly, the exact opposite of "Jew" in that it's fine as an adjective but it should not be used as a noun.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

User avatar
Aurinĭa
Forum Administrator
Posts:3909
Joined:2008-05-14, 21:18
Country:BEBelgium (België / Belgique)

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby Aurinĭa » 2022-04-20, 20:46

mōdgethanc wrote:Another word where slight differences in grammar make a big difference in meaning is the word "queer" which I brought up in my last post. Saying someone is queer, meaning LGBT+, sounds neutral to me and most of my age group; it would be normal in my social circles to use the word this way without batting an eye. But saying someone is "a queer" is something only bigots would say. When using it for more than one person, "they're queer" seems fine, but pluralizing it like "they're queers" also feels kind of suss. In this case it's, interestingly, the exact opposite of "Jew" in that it's fine as an adjective but it should not be used as a noun.

So like "She's female" vs "She's a female" or "(the) females".

User avatar
mōdgethanc
Posts:10890
Joined:2010-03-20, 5:27
Gender:male
Location:Toronto
Country:CACanada (Canada)

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby mōdgethanc » 2022-04-23, 3:24

Yes, more or less. I also think "she's female" is a little odd (to me anyway) and I would rather word it as "she's a woman", but it's not wrong per se. But "she's a female" sounds like it's talking about a zoo animal.

There is no rule as far as I can tell about when to use an article or not with personal traits or identities. "He's a Russian" is fine, but "she's a black" is weird. You just have to pick up on these unspoken rules and learn them.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-11-03, 14:45

Queer is a term I think some people try to reclaim. Idk I felt maybe that was important to mention.

I remember once seeing a video on YouTube where a Jewish woman objects to people using the term "Jew" at all, preferring "Jewish person."

Linguaphile
Posts:5358
Joined:2016-09-17, 5:06

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby Linguaphile » 2022-11-04, 1:09

"You speak English very well" outside of contexts that involve learning English

"You don't look like you speak [insert language here]"

"Where are you from?" followed by "but where are you really from?"

"Mormon" to refer to a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

"Chinese" in English or "chino" in Spanish to refer to non-Chinese Asians

"Oaxaca" in English or Spanish to refer to a person or indigenous language

Place-names used to refer to a language when it isn't the correct language name ("she speaks African", "they're talking Asian", "he speaks Indian", "they speak Oaxaca," etc.)

Deliberately mispronouncing a person's personal name (over-anglicizing or over-foreignizing) when the preferred pronunciation is well-known

Deliberately over-anglicizing the pronunciation of a place or ethnicity (i.e. ay-rab for Arab, eye-ran for Iran) when this is not the usual local pronunciation

Sometimes these come from well-intentioned ignorance such as having heard others use the same terms and adopting them innocently, but they can and are also used to be deliberately offensive and/or to emphasize "otherness". Sometimes the intention to use the words as an insult is most obvious from the way they are said, a certain over-emphasis on the word in question (or in the case of the mispronounced words, a certain over-emphasis on the mispronounced syllables). I'm not sure I'm explaining that well but if you've heard it before you know what I mean.

languagegirl93
Posts:3
Joined:2022-11-28, 9:40
Real Name:Julia
Gender:female

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby languagegirl93 » 2022-12-02, 7:07

B*rber is a word that comes to mind, A lot of people of Amazigh descent (me included) consider it offensive due to it's etymology, we feel it equates to calling us barbarians.

Karavinka

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby Karavinka » 2022-12-03, 5:50

Linguaphile wrote:Sometimes these come from well-intentioned ignorance such as having heard others use the same terms and adopting them innocently, but they can and are also used to be deliberately offensive and/or to emphasize "otherness". Sometimes the intention to use the words as an insult is most obvious from the way they are said, a certain over-emphasis on the word in question (or in the case of the mispronounced words, a certain over-emphasis on the mispronounced syllables). I'm not sure I'm explaining that well but if you've heard it before you know what I mean.


I've been living with this and I admit I do this intentionally from time to time when I want to distance myself intentionally from undesired groups. For example, I will most likely never use their preferred self-appellation and stick with "Moonies", "Mormons" or "Jehovees." If somebody tries to correct me I'll look surprised and pretend I never knew. If that makes me a very bad person, well, sue me. This is to distance myself. If I use the "correct" terminology I risk being associated as one of them or at least as a sympathizer.

As an Asian Canadian maybe I should be very ashamed of this as well, but I intentionally anglicize Chinese words and names, even when I am talking to Chinese people. The same reason; I'm sick of having being misidentified as Chinese. I don't want to take time to explain who I am, what got me to learn some Chinese, etc., so I make it as clearly as possible. It's almost a defense mechanism of sort.


And the more innocently ignorant types...

When it comes to "African" or "Indian" referring to a language someone speaks is completely understandable to me, most humans don't care to learn about foreign languages. I know many who can't name more than 20 different human languages in the world. Explaining how Hindi and Tamil are completely different from each other belonging to different language families etc., is a waste of time. (Do you care hippos and whales are closer relatives to each other than to rhinos? Even if you do, would you go out of your way to spread this information because you care and therefore everyone must care?)

A funny story, I was with a friend (she knows I am interested in languages but she's not) and we overheard a Black family speaking something she didn't recognize. She asked: is that African? Well, just because she can't recognize German when she hears it doesn't mean she's dumb, she's actually scary smart when it comes to tax, equity market and real estate. It looks like people who care about languages (and often by extension, cultures) like on forums like this tend to think everyone should somehow be as interested and respectful towards them.

Linguaphile
Posts:5358
Joined:2016-09-17, 5:06

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby Linguaphile » 2022-12-03, 16:38

[Edited: response deleted because it contained more personal information than I normally post and I'm uncomfortable with that given the topic and the response above. This thread is becoming something other than "words that can be used in derogatory ways so language learners should be aware of that" into something else and I no longer want to contribute to it]
Last edited by Linguaphile on 2022-12-04, 15:56, edited 3 times in total.

Karavinka

Re: "Innocuous" slurs

Postby Karavinka » 2022-12-03, 18:04

Linguaphile wrote:Similar situations that I am personally familiar with are a town with a large Punjabi-speaking immigrant community where "Indian" is actually one of the nicer things people call the community (but same situation: if all the Indian people in the community speak Punjabi, why not learn that it is called Punjabi?


Do you think you can make people care? It's not like the rest of the non-Punjabi population will learn to distinguish Punjabi from anything else that's spoken vaguely between Euphrates and Ganges.

The usage of "Oaxaca" as a blanket term for Mixtec is something I've never heard of so I'm a bit more cautious in saying this, but if in the eyes as a native Spanish speaker in the community the Mixtec speakers are simply "the people who speak weird language from Oaxaca" and decide to label them as Oaxaca, well, first, that's how exonyms are created. And second, humans are assholes by nature and they don't care to learn about their neighbors they deem "different" (and often by extension, "inferior") than them in their eyes.

I agree it's less than ideal and we could always try to "better" but sugar-coated rhetoric aside, I imagine for the non-Punjabi or non-Mixtec populations in the towns you're mentioning, knowing whatever the barbarians speak is actually called is as important as knowing king crabs are not actually crabs.



Now, speaking of my experiences.

I was genuinely sick of this myself and I learned that nothing I can say can change anyone's mind if they're so determined to refer to me as "that Chinese guy." In the past ten years, "Korean" being its own thing became a more common knowledge and I am less frequently questioned if I'm Chinese. And guess what, now I hear the Chinese complain when the foreigners ask them if they're Koreans.

Well, we can't all win, we're living in the world of idiots.


Return to “General Language Forum”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 14 guests