Or, we’re not American and therefore, while we know it’s an offensive term, the extreme nature of the offensiveness that you feel is almost completely lost on us. I speak only for myself.
No, it’s a good point: some of us are still baffled to the extent at which “cunt” is appaently regarded here as the Deplorable Word, the sine qua non of crudity.
Indeed. It is critically important for a Russian/Nigerian joint venture that does business entirely in Nigeria to avoid a name that, when mispronounced, could sound like an epithet used in America.
This. I find the degree of outrage in the US at “nigger” very, very hard to get to grips with. It’s not a matter of racism or lack of sympathy with the problems that black Americans have had and currently have. It’s just the way the word seems to have gone beyond “a term used as an insult” and on to be “a sound that will offend by it’s very utterance”. Kind of like “Ni!” from the Monty Python movie.
If that’s how it is in the US, well, that’s how it is. But you need to understand that in a continent on the other side of the world a company named by people from two cultures with little overlap with US culture isn’t going to be named with much understanding of how you feel about it.
We had a news item in the local paper a week or so back about a guy arrested after running amok naked and armed with a meat-cleaver. His name was Michael Hunt and I remember thinking that if I’d gone through life named Mike Hunt it would have been only a matter of time before I too ended up running amok naked and armed with a meat-cleaver. :smack:
I’ll take Latin phrases misused in an attempt to sound smart for 1000, Alex.
I think I figured it out. The OP’s and Frank’s version of “how to be a good white person vis-a-vis black persons” includes the idea that a white person should never say anything that could be construed as racist, even by the most sensitive black person who’s just itching for a fight.
I say fuck that. I’m not a racist, and I’m secure enough in my own concept of myself as not a racist that I can make jokes that play with racial issues without worrying about some idiot misconstruing it and thinking I’m a racist. It’s the idiot’s problem, not mine. Even worse are those getting offended on other people’s behalf (looking at you OP and Frank).
Finally, I know a certain gas company that would fully support the ideas expressed in this post–where my Nigaz at?
I agree that repeating the same joke over and over got old but I’d never think that the people cracking the jokes were racists. Me, I like to have some proof of racism before I jump in with the accusation. It weakens the meaning of the word when it is banded about at the slightest provocation.
They were coming up with puns based on the fact that NIGAZ looks like it would be pronounced niggahs. They wrote sentences that made sense both ways.
Oh, bullshit. This is the SDMB. People would have created a hundred clever puns if the word had been a soundalike for vagina or moray or crudite.
Sampiro is getting pitted here. Isn’t that a sign something’s off?
To answer your questions as of the time that I posted:
Am I racist? No
Am I tasteless? Yes
Am I inebriated? No
Am I ill-bred? Probably
Am I shallow? Sometimes
Am I cruel? Only inadvertently
Am I over-heated? The AC was on
Am I self-satisfied? Yup. I was rather proud that I was able to come up with a contribution that played on the word “Niggaz” rather than “niggers,” because it’s way closer to “Nigaz.” Of course, NWA’s name is based on the word “niggers,” but still.
Speaking of Niggaz With Attitude–Companies should definitely check to see if their potential names are offensive in major world languages. Remember–Nigeria is an English-speaking country! “Nigger” may not be a well-known pejorative in Nigeria and they may not have plans to do business in the U.S., but calling a company “Nigaz” is darn bad idea, especially since gas companies in the U.S. are definitely interested in doing business in Africa.
Too bad Northwest Airlines didn’t do their homework before changing their identity to NWA. What, did they think nobody would remember NWA? They were hugely influential and quite controversial. To quote the Wikipedia article:
I don’t think I’d be able to book a flight on Northwest Airlines without being a little afraid that I’d end up having Dr. Dre as my pilot! “Yo, we got some fucking turbulence. Fasten your seatbelts, bitches!”
The op seems perhaps like a person who gets upset when someone says “niggardly” too.
The joke may have wore thin after one or two versions, and perhaps doesn’t rise to all that funny, but the humor is from the same cultural self-centeredness that gives rise to sites like this. Or the fact that my 23 year old living in Japan finds funny the fact that many Japanese school kids, straight arrows they - wear shirts emblazoned with big marijauna leaves unawares of what they are. Or those that laughed at him when he was the subject of a man on the street (Leno Jay-walking style) Japanese TV show segment. And that also finds humor when the American living in China spends years politely introducing his cleaning lady to visitors unaware that he was inflecting her name so wrong that he was calling her an old whore … or Americans who wear T-shirts with Japanese writing on them that unawares to them says that they are idiots … or when the German scientific journal thought they were putting bit from a classic Chinese poem on their cover and it was actually an ad for a whorehouse … or when Americans in Australia refer to their “fanny packs” … and so on.
Okay, it may be at the level of Beavis and Butthead “He said …” jokes, and not the highest form of witticism around, but offense from it? Really? Really? Get a life.
Or that would smile that the op’s name says that (s)he is “Not ass mart, as I thought” I mean who thought that the op was a place to select an ass from a variety to purchase anyway?
Well it is funny when followed by a thread titled “Come on you homosexual demon!”
I changed “Samipro” in the thread title to “Sampiro.”
Gfactor
Pit Moderator
You highlight the URL (webaddress), copy it, and paste it into your post. Here’s this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=11296463
It links automatically.
Obviously I missed the memo that declared him the saint of the SDMB who can do no wrong. On the other hand, if I were to pit him, it wouldn’t have been for this, as other people’s jokes are hardly his fault.
I don’t know specifically what the OP’s problem is, but there was one person on the first page who didn’t quite understand how the joke worked.
I don’t think she got that the jokes weren’t offensive because we were ostensibly talking about the company.
It doesn’t help that there’s also this fucked-up dimension of how blacks have appropriated that word to a HUGE degree for their own use, and yet non-blacks are utterly forbidden from using it (even in the “nigga” form as opposed to “niggeR”, which is how it seems to be most commonly used as a form of endearment or just a neutral term for a black person) or even anything that comes CLOSE to it, like “niggardly.”
If they’re so damn offended by the word, maybe they should stop using it themselves. That would be a start.
He’s not a saint, but it’s like pitting Herby the Christmas elf* or something. If I were offended at Sampiro, the very fact that it’s Sampiro would make me suspect I was misconstruing the situation, and I’d think about it, and maybe even ask in the original thread.
*the one who wants to become a dentist. That’s Herby, right?
I don’t know if anyone explained this to you, but black people aren’t part of a hive mind. Believe it or not, they’ve actually got individual free will, so it’s possible for one black person to be offended by the word nigger while another tosses it around freely.
Shocking, I know.