People, I was brought up to understand that when I accidentally offended someone I should:
a) Apologize
b) Assure the person it was not my intent to offend, and
c) Try my damndest not to do it again
I was further taught that I should NOT:
a) Deny that I offended the person
b) Insist that the person had no reason to be offended
c) Point out that in MY culture, it isn’t considered an insult, so you shouldn’t care that it’s considered an insult in YOUR culture
d) Suggest that we all insult each other to take the sting out of the insult.
If we need any kind of a Board rule, how about this:
When someone says you’re being offensive, and you aren’t trying to be offensive, apologize and everybody move on.
I look forward to people around here saying absolutely nothing when I refer to people from the Far East as “Orientals” as that word isn’t considered offensive in the English-speaking country I come from.
The only one of the three terms you cite whose etymology is deliberately derisive, is ‘Yank’ (it being derived from the Confederate term of contempt for someone from the USA during that country’s civil war - i.e. a Yankee). Neither Brit (merely an abbreviation of British) nor Aussie have ever been considered in any way pejorative or a slur.
Two points:
merely because others might ‘back you up’ doesn’t lend any credence to your rational. I’ve read a number of posts in this thread which are wildly inaccurate - yet that hasn’t stopped others agreeing with those same posts.
I’m not aware of anyone so culturally unaware/insensitive who might seek to ‘lump’ Pakistanis in with Indians (at least no post-Partition in 1947).
Interesting - got an etymological source for that?
Do a Google for “Oriental offensive UK” and you’ll get a lot of links asking why it is offensive in the US when it isn’t in the UK. Hell, even Wikipedia classes it closer to what I said:
Except I’d say the majority of people here are from the U.S. And there ARE people here who are of Japanese descent. And they DO find it offensive. It doesn’t matter to them that in your country it’s not offensive, that you don’t mean it that way. They only know that TO THEM, it’s been used as a hateful word, and they’d prefer that you not use it.
If YOU can’t understand that, and it’s more important to you complain about “assuming the burden of racists”, then perhaps you should be posting on a board where your culture is the norm.
I find the “it’s not offensive where I am right now so it’s OK to refer to somebody on the Internet as such” argument truly staggering.
Whether one is aware of it or not; whether one agrees is should be or not; whether one has heard other nationalities referred to in various ways or not; whether you feel it doesn’t follow some kind of linguistic “abbreviation logic” or something… the term is a racial slur. There’s no getting round that. If it doesn’t tend to get used where you are right now, good for you. It’s still a racial slur.
If you didn’t know, then OK. If you’re reading this thread, then you know by now.
It’s not a case of over sensitivity. It’s a case of a word through use and associated action being loaded. It has nothing to do with logic or abbreviations; it has become its own term and is a derogatory term used to describe not just those from Pakistan, but a whole range of countries.
Holy crap, people get stabbed over this sort of language. And still people claim the language is not loaded or has no intrinsic power or meaning. It does, whether you want it to or not. “Paki” is not a term anyone should be using.
Well, that’s where I started, except the problem is, it’s apparently most widely used by Pakistanis themselves. How are you going to break the news to them that they should stop referring to themselves by a term they’re completely comfortable with, just because someone else uses it badly.
If ‘Brit’ starts being used in a derogatory way somewhere, will I have to stop calling myself one?
It was my understanding, from a conversation I had with a friend from Bangladesh in university, that the worst thing you could call a south Asian was a “coolie,” which has similar slavery connotations as the N-word. I was also under the impression that “Paki” was far more offensive to Indians, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshi (?)…basically people who aren’t even Pakistani. But I’m a Canadian English speaker with no real exposure to this, so obviously YMMV.
It perhaps helps if people have an understanding of why and who began using the term ‘Paki’ in the first place - it was largely English skinhead racists during the 1960s - and before that, uneducated people during the 1950s, when the UK invited workers from the Commonwealth Countries (mainly India, Pakistan and the West Indies - what Americans call The Caribbean) over to the UK to fill the labour pool after we’d lost so many men during WW2.
In the same way ‘nigger’ once was not considered offensive, it became so as time passed - the same is now true of ‘Paki’ (with honourably regional exceptions duly noted in this thread). Ditto ‘kyke’, ditto ‘spic’ etc etc etc.
Oh. and I can’t see a time when ‘Brit’ will ever become a derogatory term - and if it does, then hey, we’ve got broad shoulders and will probably shrug it off and make satires about the people doing so.
Sure, but is it right to say that nobody can use it? It sounds like there were pretty much two separate but coincidentally-the-same etymologies developing - one racist, the other just an abbreviation.
Or will we be informed that we can’t call ourselves that any more?
Right or wrong - you’ll never stop racism or its epithets and invective. You can only hope to educate so that hate speech directed at any group becomes so pathetic that it either falls out of use naturally, or those who insist on using it just look like uneducated twats.
I don’t see “two … etymologies developing” - just two words words with their own etymologies: Brit is merely an abbreviation of British, and Paki, which has now (at least in most of the civilised world) been recognised for its racist nature and found itself to be beyond the pale of mature usage.
Conversely, the word ‘cunt’ was in common usage (certainly in England) in most walks of life up until the 17th century - and yet we now find it considered beyond the pale of polite usage.
I cannot foresee the circumstances ever arising where British people (indeed any nationality) might be required to stop using the term ‘Brit’.
I have no opinion on the word in question, as it has yet to come up in my daily life. But I think comments like these are completely missing the point: the question is not whether or not it’s a good idea in your opinion to call people Pakis, the question is whether or not it makes sense to treat the word as actionable hate speech on this message board.
I’d argue it doesn’t, given that posters have indicated experiences that the word is commonly used and/or inoffensive in their particular part of the world. This is not to say it’s a wonderful word that everyone should say as often as possible, just that it doesn’t make sense for the staff of the board to enact blanket prohibitions that will catch the innocent as well as the racist a-holes. Report the posts of the latter, but start by politely trying to educate the former before whipping out the hate speech card. Hate speech rules should be reserved for the most extreme cases to spare people from having to listen to racist troll nutjobs for more than a post or two, IMO. Everything else can and should be handled by either the rules against trolling or the Pit.