What the fuck are you going on about?
Ensign Edison: points taken. I think we’re all on the same page now. Carry on.
Well, most of us are. I think Martini is in another book entirely, with fragile yellow pages that smell of attics and the grave…one where he’s zooming around town in his monocle and tophat, trying to figure out which is the velocitator and which is the deceleratrix, making his way to Lady Alicia’s daughter’s grand Coming Out cotillion. He just wants to have a gay time with some queer birds, is that so much to ask? It’s unfair how we keep him down. But I sympathize. Gay people are always stealing my best jokes too. This total homo I’m married to for example. The other day I caught him saying “I’m pretty gay, but that’s really gay”. That’s my line, you reclaimist, rainbow-hugging sonofabreeder!
“Black-hearted” I assume to be not race-related at all; we have the same expression in Spanish and Catalan. “Indian-giver” I think means someone who doesn’t really give you things.
Could you please fight some foreigner ignorance and explain the others? And confirm whether my impression on Indian giver is correct, pretty please.
Thanks.
I’m not Eve, but I can help you. An “Indian giver” is someone who gives something but takes it back, yeah. “Jew” when used as a (very offensive) verb means to bargain or to be cheap, because anti-Semites say Jewish people are tight with money. “Mighty white” is a phrase that was discussed heartily here recently, as someone already linked to, but briefly there are two uses: the sincere, in which someone is complimenting you for being a good person, and the ironic, in which someone is pointing out that you’re acting like a privileged jerk.
Some people dispute that “mighty white” has racial origins, but all these terms are generally understood to be racially-based. Of them, only the “Jewing” thing is now completely unacceptable in polite society.
I wouldn’t say that’s at all homophobic. It describes a certain aspect of someone’s personality more accurately than straight or gay does. A guy could live in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere who is not at all a metro-sexual, and yet be as gay as… as queer as… as gay as two guys with their shirts off making out on a ferris wheel. It has nothing to do with the metro-sexuals who are gay or straight. I do, however, feel the word should be hyphenated, like cheer-leader used to be.
Shanghaied?
Shanghaied??
From the Master: What’s the origin of the expression “Indian giver”?
I agree that “black hearted” was not racial.
Ensign Edison gave a good explanation of “Jew down.” A related offensive verb is “gyp,” short for gypsy (Spanish gitano), that uses the shortened word for the people better identified as Rom to mean “swindle.”
BlueKangaroo provided a link to a rather rancorous discussion of “mighty white” that demonstrates how language can be perceived differently even by people who are currently using it, although, in that thread, I did post a reference to the origins and original use of “mighty white”.
I didn’t mean that “metrosexual” is a homophobic insult; rather, that the fact that the concept was deemed necessary in the first place suggests that we still have a long way to go in the fight against gender stereotyping and “soft” bigotry.
It’s a matter of opinion, I guess, but I always considered the concept of “metrosexuality” to be a tool for maintaining a clear barrier between “gay” and “straight”, as if straight people have to apologise for (or at least justify) exhibiting behaviour that is associated with homosexuality. Whoever invented the term was effectively saying “don’t worry, it’s OK - our men aren’t all turning gay, they’re just a special kind of hetero who moisturises”.
I don’t feel strongly - perhaps contrary to the impression I might have given - but it leaves a slight bad taste in my mouth that “gay” and “straight” are still so narrowly defined that a word like “metrosexual” should even be necessary.
Homosexuality is sooooo gay!
Heh.
Seriously, I was once guilty of this, in my teens. I don’t do it anymore, except sarcastically, as seen above.
I agree that “gay”=“bad” is a symptom, but it’s a symptom I don’t particularly care for. I’m constantly amazed by the cognitive dissonance it takes to think that “that’s so gay” has no homophobic colour to it. Nobody would have ever used it to mean “bad” if it weren’t for homophobia.
That people who consider themselves pro-gay use it is not evidence for its not being anti-gay. Until recently, lots of people used the expression “jew down” without themselves holding any particular animus towards Jewish people, or even grasping that it references Jewish people at all - but we regard that as unacceptable today. (And it wouldn’t be much better if you were to spell it “djoue down,” if I may say.)
I don’t take offence to it in the sense that I assume that the person using it is homophobic. I do take offence to it in the sense that it stems from homophobia. So my response is to educate as to why I would prefer it not be used.
However, I’ve noticed that, since many people who use it don’t even think of homophobia - and often consider themselves pro-gay - it’s relatively easy to get them to stop. One time in drama class (if you please), a girl was setting us up in a tableau. She had one of the guys perched up on a chair or something, and went “Okay, now I know this probably feels kind of gay -”
“Oh, maybe I should do it then,” I said. She promptly fell all over herself apologizing. It was very entertaining.