C K Dexter Haven, unbidden by me, was the first to cry no personal insults. I said “don’t go there.” Yet here we are, apparently there.
You said, laughably, Polish isn’t a culture or an ethnic group-- it’s just a nationality, the term is “Slavic”. Forget for a minute that according to my research that’s a language term. Forget that’s like saying English, Japanese, French and German aren’t ethnic groups, either, just nationalities, and that the “correct” ethnic terms are, I dunno, Anglo-Saxon, Altaic, Gaellic and Deutch. Okay. Whatever. I linked to two different cites regarding Polish (or Poles) as a Slavic subset ethnic group with a culture, and one defining “disingenuous.” You dismissed lee’s real-life eyewitness accounts of Polish-American groups in Illinois as being baseless “assertions” while citing some vague European Studies course in some alleged college you apparently took no notes in that you’re somehow convinced taught you the correct term is “Slavic.”
Now, see, I might have bought the idea that the preferred term now is “Slavic” while “Polish” is old and declasse, but no; you just said nothing like exists, and I am wrong. My very casual research shows I am not wrong.
When people hand you new facts, and your opinion remains unchanged, that’s characteristic of … someone who’s inflexible mind refuses to budge from an old mindset. I am, frankly, fascinated by you.
This is why I don’t get why posters call me a nice guy. I’m polite. I usually let things slide. But I’m not nice. I’m really, really often incapable of letting go of even a petty little point like this.
Depends how you’re defining ethnicity. I tend to use linguistics and by that standard the Poles are indeed a fairly distinct ethnic group, certainly seperate from my Serb ancestors ;). But I’ll allow that isn’t the only way to define ethnicities and not always the best either ( “Arab” as an all-encompassing common ethnic group isn’t terribly coherent for example ). Also it is certainly true that in misty annals of history the Poles were once merely a tribal group ( the Polanie or Polanians ) settled primarily between the Odra and Vistula rivers, within a larger section of loosely homogenous western Slavs, not all that different from the Czechs for example ( however they were distinct from, say, southern Slavs like the Serbs, Croats and the groups that became the Bulgars ). Even after the western Slavs differentiated, Poland was huge and very much a multinational state and to be Polish was indeed a political distinction, not an ethnic one. However one could be a Pole who was Polish.
Today, since the rise of nationalism, linguistic groups have become to some extent synonomous with ethnicity and Poland is no longer a multiethnic state. ~97% of the population speaks Polish which I believe is no longer mutually intelligible with cousins like Czech or Slovak. I think that frankly most authorities would tend to agree with Askia at this point and call Polish an ethnicity. Even Norman Davies’ in God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. I states, while making the point that Poland once meant a rather different thing, that:
In the past ‘Polish’ was not so much an ethnic term, as a political and cultural one.
Emphasis added, which seems to hint pretty strongly that most consider Polish to be an ethnic term now.
I have no cite, but I will say RikWriter is indeed displaying wilfull ignorance on this point. The definition of “ethnicity” is not so hard-and-fast that we can say categorically that Slavs in general are an ethnic group but Poles are not, they are a national group. In fact, the word “ethnicity” is commonly applied to nationalities. And the kind of grouping Rik denominates as an “ethnicity” is generally not a point of self-identification for anybody. We have a Polish-American community. We have a (much smaller) Russian-American community. We do not have a Slavic-American community – nobody really thinks in those terms.
P.S. I want to thank Askia for continuing to fight the good fight. Even though I don’t always agree with him, I salute the fact that he is always ready to grab this particular bull by the horns.
Me, I’m tuckered out. Race weary. Tired of repeating myself.