I just ran across it a few days ago myself; I’ve been re-reading David Weber’s military sci-fi books .
[QUOTE=The Shadow of Saganami]
If Abigail was right and those ships were still in the process of working up, there were likely to be weaknesses in their performance, chinks in their armor.
[/QUOTE]
I expect the likelihood of running across the phrase depends a lot on what or who you are reading or listening to. Anything involving fighting is logically going to be more likely to have such a combat-derived phrase turn up.
Bullshit, it was used after Lin finally lost a game after winning something like 8 straight because of high turn overs. There was nothing offensive about it.
I think the phrase is only offensive in a given context. If they make another Iron Man movie in the villain discovers a weakness in Tony Stark’s armor and exploits it and he calls it the chink in his armor, that is not racist. But the pun about Jeremy Lin was very questionable.
To say there was NOTHING racist about it is completely wrong. Was there racist intent, who knows for sure, but the word ‘chink’ is undeniably a racist term in certain contexts. The potential play on words that is very common in sports headlines certainly can lead to an impression of insensitivity at best. It requires an incredible amount of social unawareness to use the phrase in the context it was used in, even if it wasn’t intended to be have any racial connotations.
It was used with a clearly racial connotation. That’s generally considered offensive by a large number of people…including those in charge at ESPN, which took appropriate action after the incident.
In order words, Jeremy Lin’s poor performance allowed the Knicks to be defeated.
I don’t understand how people read that as the pun referring to a particular weakness of Lin’s. It seems pretty clear that in this context Lin is the weakness that led to the team’s defeat - that Lin is the chink. It’s beyond questionable in that context.
If the headline was “Turnarounds are the chink in Lin’s armor” it wouldn’t read like they were literally calling Lin a chink, although it would still be an unsafe and lousy headline.
My mother uses this word all the time to describe not just budgetary tightness but meager portions of food, someone paying scant attention to her concerns or requests. It was a not particularly uncommon part of my vocabulary by the age of seven or eight, long before any stupid controversy. Why would I subtract an ancient and evocative part of my pre-existing vocabulary when there is no legitimate cause for grievance, but is a deeply stupid illegitimate pretext?
That sounds like enabling ignorance, as opposed to my policy of if not fighting it, ignoring it.
Or – I get to choose my adjectives unless they are legitimately offensive.
I don’t know what incident you’re referring to, but no. “Chink in the armour” is not a racist term, and has no allusion or reference to race in it. Whether the incident you’re talking about adds an extra dimension to this, I don’t know, but it could be if referring specifically to a Chinese person, depending on the context.
My mother uses this word all the time to describe not just budgetary tightness but meager portions of food, someone paying scant attention to her concerns or requests. It was a not particularly uncommon part of my vocabulary by the age of seven or eight, long before any stupid controversy. Why would I subtract an ancient and evocative part of my pre-existing vocabulary when there is no legitimate cause for grievance, but is a deeply stupid illegitimate pretext?
That sounds like enabling ignorance, as opposed to my policy of if not fighting it, ignoring it.
Or – I get to choose my adjectives unless they are legitimately offensive.
I think that if you, or friends were to say something like that while watching the game or talking about it at the bar or whatever, it would be somewhat groanworthy/clever in the manner of many puns and jokes that deliberately play on insults/curse words/sexual terms/other offensive terminology. When my brother told me about the headline the other day, I admit, I laughed, because it was offensive and that’s the source of the humour.
Which is why it’s misplaced as a newspaper headline - it’s entirely inappropriate, unnecessary, and very likely to offend a lot of people and any journalist ought to know that.
So…I chose “depends on context.” In the context that originated this discussion, yes, it’s racist. In the context of a suit of armour, no, it isn’t. Then there’s lots of grey in between.
In general, it’s a neutral term, but when you use it to refer to someone of Chinese descent, it’s racist.
A similar example is “We hit the slopes” when going skiing, but when Robert Duvall says “Scares hell out of the slopes” in ** Apocalypse Now**, it’s racist.
The typical usage of the phrase has no racist connotations at all. However, some racists like the phrase for the veil it provides when they can’t stop themselves from using the ethnic slur which is homonymous with the word meaning “a small cleft, rent, or fissure,” so it certainly can be a racist term in some instances.
