She calls our kids (and occasionally me) “monkeys” as a term of affection.
She teaches at a public school, and most of her students are black.
One day a school counselor (also black… you can see where this is going…) was in her room and asked her something like “are you about to go to lunch?” My wife answered something like “Yep, just gotta get these monkeys started on their work.”
The counselor replied, “I am offended by what you just said.”
My wife wasn’t even sure what she was talking about for a few moments. But once she realized what she’d said, she stammered out an explanation/apology concerning how the term is one she uses at home purely as one of affection.
But she got called into the principle later that day, where she wept profusely while the principle assured her he knew she didn’t mean it in an offensive manner but that she was required to watch her mouth in the future.
And because my wife is a sensitive soul and a people-pleaser, she called in sick for most of the next day, because she felt nauseous at the very prospect of encountering anyone aware of the incident. She only went in at the end to finish some important paperwork she’d been working on–and wept profusely at some point during that process while the school’s kindly secretary™ comforted her.
The school counselor, from that day on, seemed to go out of her way to pretend she was great friends with my wife, which seemed odd. We don’t know if she simply had no idea what effect there was from her telling the principle about the incident (seriously my wife could have been fired over this if the principle were less sane, and that’s certainly not unheard of) or if it got back to her how upset my wife was and this made her feel bad, or what.
5 the head or director of a school or, especially in England, a college.
** not principle** which means prin·ci·ple/ˈprinsəpəl/
Noun:
[ul]
[li]A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.[/li][li]A rule or belief governing one’s personal behavior.[/li][/ul]
Sorry if I offended you
I enjoy this one, as a man…
‘I’m never having kids’
Woman: “Oh you selfish man child, afraid to be responsible?”
“No I have a hereditary disease that means 50% of my children will have anything from trouble walking to an inability to breath…”
Woman “Oh.”
I caught myself just before yelling: “Get out of the tree you monkeys!” at my son and his friend who we had taken to the zoo. Said friend is African-American. (Well, African-American-Kiwi I guess). I don’t imagine friend would have been insulted (jeez… his mother calls him her “little golliwog”)… but my brain caught up with my mouth and suggested that European-Kiwi *moi *calling black kid a monkey might be taken wrongly by bystanders… even if the pair of them were hanging from a tree making hooting noises.
I remember one my mom did when I was about 5. A little boy from a few houses down, who happened to have cerebral palsy, was having a birthday party and I was invited. My mom, having two daughters and a bunch of nieces, had no idea what a little boy would like as a gift, so she called his mom to ask for ideas.
His mom broke down in tears and angrily replied that she should get him whatever she would get anyone else - that he was just a regular kid like anyone else and didn’t need to be treated differently. I’m sure my mom tried to explain and I imagine it got smoothed over, but my mom was absolutely heartbroken that she had upset her. She really did just have no clue what boys were into.
One time, on the phone with a customer, I answered a question with “yes, Ma’am”. I was immediately corrected, it was a middle aged dude, he insisted that he wasn’t offended because it happened all the time, but then I have to wonder why he went to great lengths to explain to me that he wasn’t a woman, then went on to tell me that he wasn’t gay or anything either. Sooooo… was he offended or not. This guy must have had some voice box issues, I’ve never heard a man sound so much like a woman in my life, wow, talk about spooky. (I’ll probably find out later he’s some huge weight-lifter and he’s not offended after he beats me to a pulp :D)
I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, often times artists really want get an un-biased opinion. Even if they don’t want to hear it and they’re offended, it still has a much needed impact, either they’ll quit (which is sad, you should never give up), or they’ll strive to do better and please a larger audience.
I swear to Og this is true… Once I made a joke about someone being eaten by bears, and this woman practically fainted. It turned out the woman’s sister had been eaten by a crocodile while on vacation in Australia the previous summer.
Okay, I’m about to unintentionally offend people in this thread, but I giggled a bit at this. Not at your mom’s heartbreak, mind you, nor at the kid or his mom, but just the scenario. I can actually see it happening on one of the darker sitcoms. I mean, was it really that cut and dried: “What would your son like–” “HE’D LIKE WHAT ANY OTHER BOY WOULD LIKE! DON’T SINGLE HIM OUT AS A FREAK!!” “Uh, I wasn’t…I mean, I just don’t know what any boy would want…” Perhaps your mom was not the first or only person to unintentionally offend this kid’s mom.
I’m blocking out my worst offense…I know I’ll remember it later…so I’ll share with you two episodes in my life of teachers offending students.
First time: Sixth grade health class in 1968-69, the Healthy Attitudes Towards Sex segment of the curriculum. Health teacher was a gym teacher (male) that everyone hated because he was just so weird and loud. He’s giving us a lecture about the importance of a good male role-model in a boy’s life, going on and on about why this is so important and basically saying that boys without such role models would grow up to be sissies or gay (it was the sixties, remember?) when Greg Burnett jumps up from his chair and runs from the room crying. Teacher is shocked, because the only excuse for leaving the classroom without getting permission is imminent vomiting or a bathroom emergency, so he asks, “What’s wrong, why did Greg run out?” and one brave member of the class replies, “Did you forget that his dad just died last week and now you’ve told him he’s going to be a homo?” (remember, it was the 60’s, and we were sixth graders). I’d never ever seen a teacher turn such an awful shade of red before…I was afraid he was going to have a stroke, he was so embarrassed at what he had done. He did try to make it up to Greg later…treated him with kid gloves from then on. But we lost what little respect we’d had for him as a teacher in that moment.
The second incident happened also in health class, now in 12th grade, though it wasn’t the teacher this time, but the Chief of the fire department, who was also the father of one of our class members, and well-known by all of us. His daughter was friends with and on the Dance Squad with another classmate, Lisa, who was stunningly gorgeous and just the sweetest thing. Lisa’s mom was also incredibly beautiful, but had been badly burned on one side of her face many years ago and had some rather extensive scarring. So the fire chief is a guest speaker, giving a lecture about fire safety and teaching us all about how natural gas leaks flow through a house, and the correct way to put out a grease fire, and all sorts of other great safety information, peppered with cautionary tales of real fires in our city. And he mentions this one fire where someone was adding lighter fluid to an already-burning fire, and how the flames went back up the stream of lighter fluid and exploded the can in this woman’s hands and how she was badly burned on her face and arm, and he said something about her being stupid to do that…the fire was already going well, there was no reason to add more lighter fluid, and just how her carelessness and stupidity had nearly cost her her life. Not sure exactly what point Lisa ran crying from the room, followed by the chief’s horrified daughter who could not believe her dad used her friend’s mom as an example while she was sitting right there.We were all stunned…most of us had been too polite to ever ask just how Lisa’s mom had been burned…and basically very, very disappointed in the chief for such a judgmental comment in front of our friend.
A couple of years back here in Dallas, guy who was photographing kids with Santa was in the habit of saying “Say monkey!” to kids to get them to smile instead of “say cheese!” A black family at the party took offense. He had never been known to show any racist attitude before, was mortified when the kid’s parents took it as a racist comment, apologized profusely… and was shitcanned anyway, because the dad’s brother was a state senator who apparently used his clout to get the guy fired.
Heh. Reminds me of a recent faux pas of my mom’s: her dogs were in the back yard, and the little shit of a spaniel was barking his idiot head off because some neighborhood kids had the temerity to walk down the street. Dog wouldn’t shut up, so my mom yells “I’m gonna beat the black right off of you!”* You can guess what color the neighbor kids were…
*FTR, my mom doesn’t and wouldn’t beat her dog. Sometimes I think she should, but she doesn’t.
I personally have never offended anyone. And I have a very charming bridge for sale, at a low, low price.
I scrolled through thinking I’d already posted but apparently not. (I DID post this in the sitcom moments so sorry to spam, but it fits better here.)
I used to manage a small independent single-screen theater and as we used to work pretty much a skeleton crew usually I’d be selling the tickets and the assistant manager would be working the concession stand and we’d maybe only have one other worker on the weekends when/if it was super busy.
Anyway, one night I was selling tickets and a (hetro) couple came in and bought tickets for the late show early and I ripped them, handed the stubs back (we were so small-scale we didn’t even have doormen) and they said “Is it cool if we go eat and come back?” I said “Oh sure, just hang onto your stubs.”
Well, late show rolls around and it must’ve been slow because I remembered them from earlier and the guy goes: “Wanna see my stub?” and because I have no business being out in public or something I say: “Are you sexually harassing me?”
His girlfriend starts SCREAMING with laughter and the guy turns 15 shades of purple. OOPS!
Several of my dorm-mates were from Andorra. All of them spoke 4-5 languages at native levels, and there was one which the rest of us considered proof that language ability does not correlate with intelligence.
She was studying Tourism, one of the entrance exam’s questions had been “pick two countries Spain has borders with”, the right answer was “France and Portugal” and she’d picked “Italy and Lybia”. When we pointed out the correct answer, she claimed that “Spain and France don’t no way share a border!” Uh… have you looked at a map of your country lately?
I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth, same as everybody else, but most cases where when I was old enough to be able to clarify things and I don’t really remember them. But one time when I was 5 or so, I got my parents and another couple terribly, terribly angry and I couldn’t understand why for hours! My parents had grabbed me, apologized, driven back home without entering the place we’d been going to visit and just. Wouldn’t. Explain!
It took me hours to get them to understand that when I’d called the other couple’s toddler a “cute midget” I’d meant no offense, midget was what the older kids at school called us and, as far as we knew, it meant “small kid”.
Is “midget” a worse word in Spanish? Unless the toddler genuinely had development problems, I don’t see how a small child saying that to a smaller child could possibly get several adults all worked up if s/he were speaking in English.
The actual word would have meant the person in question did have physical developmental problems and was more technical than enano (which means dwarf in the LotR sense as well as in the Little Person sense and is often used as a term of endearment for, you guessed it, little kids).
But still, I do think they were all being complete poopyheads and that incident is one of the reasons why I’m very fast to jump in when I think grown-ups are misunderstanding a kid who merely picked the wrong sort-of-homophone or a word he hasn’t understood completely (so far I’ve been right every time :p). I find it enormously irritating how people can manage to, on one hand, treat kids like they’re stupid (they’re not, but of course they are uninformed, that’s what the whole “learning” process is about!) and on the other expect a 3-6yo kid to have the same linguistic skills as an adult.
And it’s not as if grown-ups all have perfect vocabulary, spelling and grammar, uh?
