Only the police officer example seems relevant here. I’ll admit I actually am surprised if it’s typical for fired police officers to be able to get jobs as police officers. I would expec that to be extremely rare and exceptional.
It’s on my list.
But again, my claim was that I’ve never heard it used straightforwardly with derogatory intent. The only contexts I have ever heard it used in are ones where it is being discussed as a word, or in quotations. Movie scripts would fall under the latter two categories IMO.
Heh, I had to think about that one for a couple of seconds as well.
This one actually seems worse to me, for some reason. I think because “sweet and sour” is not really a cliche the way “chink in the armor” is.
I was listening to a BBC call-in show yesterday, and the point was made that younger people are less likely to know the innocent meaning of “chink” and be much more familiar to its other connotation. Which makes perfect sense to me. I don’t use “chink” in my daily language at all. “Chink in the armor” isn’t exactly waiting to roll off my tongue either.
But I have heard “chink” being used as a racial slur. Either as something addressed to someone in an insulting way or something being discussed as a racial slur.
I would be shocked to meet a person–especially someone young–who has a different experience.
I’m a twentysomething (barely, but I’m still hanging on!) with a journalism degree. I’m not even US American and I was aware of the racial connotation. Please stop pretending your background is unique or even that unusual.
This makes absolutely no sense. If I thought my background was anywhere close to unique, I wouldn’t be opining that there are likely to be lots of other people who share it and thus lots of people who don’t hear the word in this racist way. I mean, huh? Maybe you need another cup of coffee and then try again. 
Some hits from googling ‘site:http://espn.go.com/ “sweet and sour”’
So it’s a cliche in sports writing I guess?
I never read about sports so I didn’t know that.
I do find occasional non-sports uses through google, though. For example:
Sweet and Sour Newt and President’s speech hits sweet and sour notes
Opine away, but over 60 people have posted in this thread, have any of them agreed with you that they don’t hear “chink” as a racial slur?
The guy’s an editor, it’s his JOB do know different meanings of words and phrases, and make sure he doesn’t make his company look bad by overlooking inappropriate meanings. You can’t say “Sorry, I didn’t know what Dirty Sanchez meant” or “When those two young women won the Beach Volleyball Cup, the headline practically wrote itself.”
A sportswriter who doesn’t know the offensive meaning of “chink” is about as qualified to write professionally as a sportswriter who doesn’t know that “football” in Spain is different from “football” in the US.
I don’t know what exactly they mean by “young people”, but I’m 29 and I heard “chink” all the time in both British and American schools.
“Dock that editor a day’s pay for napping on the job!”
I think any argument that boils down to “I didn’t see the problem with this and I’m super good at this sort of thing!” will fail for two reasons:
- Lots of other people saw it, and
- It was someone’s job to see it.
This wasn’t some super hidden obscure word. This wasn’t something only a handful of people in the US would recognize. This wasn’t a slur only in a foreign country (we had a brief, amicably settled kerfuffle on this board over a username that was this type of slur).
And people are held to a higher standard when they are on the job than when they are not, even if those not on the job are splendiferous lexicographers and all around swell people.
I find this even more dumbfounding than your claims that chink is obscure. You didn’t know “homonym?” It’s a basic element of language.
There’s no such policy being made. What is being said is that this is one of the reasons you have to be careful in printing homonyms: you can confuse people and leave unwanted impressions. This is something journalists are supposed to pay attention to, and it’s why your pleas about Federico’s potential ignorance don’t count for very much. It’s understandable if you and I don’t know how a nuclear reactor works, but if it comes out that a nuclear technician doesn’t know, he’s going to be fired. You and I might not know how to properly ground electrical wiring, but if an electrician doesn’t know, he’ll lose his job. Those are sort of extreme examples, but your comments about Federico not knowing about the racial slur - assuming he’d never heard it, never seen it in a movie, never read it in a book because it’s so obscure - doesn’t help him because by virtue of his job, he is expected to pay more attention to language than you are and know more about it. This is stuff journalists have to do.
I think you’re the only one who cares if you have heard it. Your personal experience is not the issue here. It’s beyond dispute that chink is sometimes used as a racial slur. That’s really all that matters here.
Why? Because you personally haven’t heard it? [For the record, I did not make that comparison and you may be confusing me with somebody else.]
It shows that people understood the headline could be read as containing a racial slur. That’s all that matters to ESPN, although it does indicate that maybe the slur isn’t so fusty and obscure. It doesn’t matter if people were applying 20/20 hindsight or how they read it “fresh.” These things matter to you for whatever reason, but they don’t matter to ESPN. ESPN does not want to be publishing racial slurs even if the slurs are clearer in hindsight. Their articles are published on the internet and they stay there for a long time, so plenty of people read its articles in the cold light of day or after hearing their friends and coworkers talk about them.
I find your stance baffling. You yourself find nothing wrong with the headline, yet you chastise someone else for finding the headline funny? If there isn’t anything wrong with the headline, then why can’t curioushat find the headline funny?
As for your general ignorance regarding Asian discrimination in the United States, I suggest you open yourself to the possibility that Asian discrimination is real and has a harrowing effect on real people. If you have truly gone through life without ever witnessing or even hearing about Asian-discrimintation, then well… you aren’t paying attention.
An Asian-American sportswriter at ESPN: Jay Caspian Kang’s take on Lin and Race
His article links to a NY Magazine article on Asian discrimination in the US Army:
http://nymag.com/news/features/danny-chen-2012-1/index3.html
If you think that the thing that makes it seem funny to people of poor character involves a misunderstanding of it, then you don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, and you do think there’s something wrong with the people who find it funny.
This is some whatthefuckery right here. Slacker has never stated nor said anything that could plausibly be interpreted as implying that he’s not familiar with the existence of serious discrimination towards Asians.
Kang* notes that Lin used the online handle ChiNkBaLLa88 when he was in high school. I wonder how a young Jeremy Lin became familiar with such a fusty, obscure racial slur that nobody uses.
Incidentally, why does any publication pay Jason Whitlock to write about anything? He finally takes a break from talking about Serena Williams’ ass and does it by sending a tweet saying Jeremy Lin has a small penis. How does this guy have a job at all?
*Point of stupidity: I didn’t know Kang was Asian because I’d always read his last name as “King.”
It is a homonym, but who cares? Did he really have to use the word “chink” when referring to an Asian athlete, even if only figuratively? As a major sports writer, he couldn’t think of any better analogy? Any better word that would avoid the obvious backlash that would result? Really?
If you’re a writer for a major network, you are held to higher standards. Tact and word choice are huge components of the job itself. Journalism spends a great deal of time with this.
I rarely hear people use “spic and span” but I sure as hell wouldn’t use it in a major headline in conjunction with someone of Hispanic descent. Just because you don’t hear it being used doesn’t mean you don’t necessarily know about it at all or understand that in other contexts it is used frequently enough to be considered offensive.
Okay. What about “white on rice”? With a bit of Googling, I found (funnily enough from a 2003 post on SD here http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=3254605&postcount=3 ) that a Mark Jones of ESPN has used that phrase to talk about defense before. It’s also a pretty commonly used phrase. Or how about “Nipped in the bud”?
The point still stands, either way.
By “plausible deniability” I mean the sort of defense where you can say, “Look, this is a common idiom. It’s even been used before in past articles. Not a whole lot of people use it, in my experience. And I have an Asian wife – why would I make such a screwup intentionally?” It’s a *plausible *way to *deny *any sort of intentional malice or even bad punning.
I’d say this is fairly ignorant. Calling an Asian person a c-word makes me feel the same way as if I called a black person the n-word, and I can guarantee many others feel the same.
Either way, it doesn’t matter: If you’re in charge of writing for a major network, the standards are higher for you. If you can’t handle the job functions, you’ll get booted out in favor of someone who hopefully can.
SlackerInc, you are a wordsmith whose avocation is copy editing, and who until recently did not know the word homonym.
You are the product of college professor parents whose grandparents lived a Park Avenue/ Palm Beach existence, yet you lived in ghettos as a child.
You are a cinephile who has never seen Blazing Saddles and who made it only partway through Gran Torino.
It seems to me that your experiences are very oddly inconsistent and atypical. I suggest that you may not be in a very good position to judge what the average person should be expected to know or perceive as regards fairly common racial slurs.
I further suggest that if you ever find yourself in a job like that of the guy in the matter under discussion, that you make use of the Urban Dictionary on a daily basis. You wouldn’t want to miss the fact that a writer tried to describe the Jets quarterback as dirty Sanchez, for instance, even if he were literally covered in mud after a game.