You don’t have to apologise, especially not to me, but I think it’s inaccurate to state that the majority of nordies haven’t met Chinese people at least in passing. There’s a smattering of Chinese (and other especially Asian folk) through the place. If it’s any consolation I get stared at for my mad Dublin accent when it’s heard when i’m “home”. According to my cousins they’ll stare out people from the next village over too. 
So, nobody likes my idea of a piece of software that watches for these potential misunderstandings to head them off before they blow up? I’d say that since we have clearly established that some people hear certain words regularly and others do not (and obviously they are not taught in school), we should, instead of expecting everyone to be personally familiar with gutter talk, have a computer watch for it. It could scan the names in the story to see if anyone Latino was mentioned, for instance, in a story that used the phrase “spic 'n span”, or anyone Asian in one that referenced “gobbledygook”. Or it could just highlight those phrases and put up a dialogue box asking if anyone of the race this could be construed to reference is mentioned in the article. Sort of silly but probably necessary, and could save someone’s job.
I’d say that’s giving them more credit than they deserve. My sense is that they are so dreadfully lowbrow, anyone even remotely bordering on middlebrow or above quickly flees. Which sounds like we’re getting off on a tangent; but again, my sense is that the racist epithet “chink” is likely to be heard only in very lowbrow company. Before this thread, I’d have thought in the 21st century it was probably used only marginally more often than “coolie” (or is that one also considered by some of you to be part of common parlance?)
Which reminds me–those of you who report hearing this slur regularly (in blue collar Chicago, in Northern Ireland, and wherever else): what do you do or say when you hear it? How do you react?
Okay, you got me. I accidentally added one letter to a film title. The fact that you would make a big deal out of that says a lot in itself.
“Claims”? Pffft. You say that like seeing a bunch of Woody Allen films is like climbing Everest or hiking the Appalachian Trail. Why would I “claim” to if I didn’t? I’ve seen nineteen of his films, though admittedly that’s less than half and Midnight in Paris was the only one of those released in the past fifteen years (ack, I’m getting old).
I love Roger Ebert, but he’s hardly infallible. Have you ever noticed that he constantly gets significant plot details wrong in his reviews?
I’ve seen precisely one: Young Frankenstein. (I’ve also seen many clips of Spaceballs, which struck me as painfully unfunny.) YF is the most critically acclaimed of his works, so if I didn’t like it, why bother with the rest? There are so many films, and life is short.
Indeed not; although I know the general plot outline and saw the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that riffed on it. Speaking of Curb Your Enthusasm, btw, that used to be one of my favourite shows, but then I stopped watching because of the horribly racist portrayal of the Black family (J.B. Smoove in particular). Why didn’t *that *incite howls of protest? No way that was inadvertent, and I was terribly disappointed in Larry David who had always seemed to be a progressive guy.
Ha, touché; but I’ve been posting regularly the past few weeks. I was also a regular on the old AOL SDMB back in the '90s (is anyone else here still around from that?).
ETA: Okay, I see it now. I not only added a letter to “Synecdoche”, I also had a brain fart and called “Young Frankenstein” “Bride of Frankenstein” (though the latter is also overrated IMO). A firing offence, surely!
I’m confused; he was born in California in the USA, so wouldn’t “Lin Yanks Away Winning Streak”, be a better headline.
I’ve heard Chinkie used to refer to Chinese takeaways a few times in the UK without any hatred behind it.
There was an episode of Politically Incorrect where they discussed a store that discounted chicken for Black history month. Bill Maher asked the panel why this was offensive. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or playing devil’s advocate. Tempestt Bledsoe was like, “Come on, Bill. You know someone was trying to be funny.”
I can see a case where someone thought: Black people like chicken. Let’s put it on sale. But the other 99/100 get a :dubious:. This incident reminds a lot of that episode.
As soon as someone starts selling a “common sense” machine, we might as well throw up our hands and reboot.
You’re essentially saying we should develop a tool that 99% of writers will never need to use. And the 1% who do need it probably shouldn’t be writing anyway.
This. We don’t need software; we need writers and editors who are better at their jobs than Federico.
You implied that the editor’s background may have been one that did not allow him exposure to the word “chink” as a slur. You called it a fusty old racial slur that nobody uses, and you live in a linguistic environment that causes you to see the word differently.
My point is that everyone in this thread knows that “chink” is used as a racial slur, and knew that long before the Lin incident. There is no excuse for not knowing that the word is used as a slur. Especially when your job title is Editor, words are your business, you need to know them. Not knowing them is grounds for dismissal.
Yes, when used in the phrase “chink in the armor” it is not being used as a racial slur, but that is not the point. The point is… you do NOT use homonyms of racial slurs in articles about people who would be the target of that particular slur.
It’s kind of a silly idea. This is what editors are for. As far as the practicalities go, I’m not sure why anybody would go to the cost of developing it.
That’s not to say I’m somehow opposed to the software idea, just that it doesn’t seem very practical.
Well, since we’re off on this tangent:
It certainly isn’t limited to blue collar Chicago in my experience. Most of my experience with these terms was at a private Catholic high school, which predominantly drew from families firmly in the middle class, and was probably about 50% suburban. Hell, I’d say this sort of racist language was not uncommon among the well-to-do although, as I said, the openness of that kind of language is dying down. People my generation (I’m 36) are unlikely to be that openly racist. That said, I have high school friends who are doing very well for themselves and who have gone to medical schools, and still will pull out a word like “nigger” and “spic.” The justification tends to be “I’m not talking about all black people; I’m talking about niggers (a certain subset of black people, in their minds.)” I will not offer any commentary about that line of thinking (although Chris Rock seems to have popularized it.)
But I will admit that Chicago is somewhat special in this regard. It’s always been a very segregated city with a lot of open racism. And it’s not limited to “white-on-[ethnic group/race]” racism. (Plenty of non-white on non-white racism, too). And it certainly isn’t limited to class, either.
As for what do I do? If it’s a family member, I might just roll my eyes. If it’s a friend I may say “come on, do you have to use that word?” If I hear it in passing, I ignore it. (For example, at a wedding I shot in Northwest Indiana, a Michael Jackson song came on and the bride, I shit you not, screamed at the DJ: “Turn that nigger’s music off!” I wish I were making that up, because that’s pretty brazen. What am I supposed to do?)
And, to combat your idea that this is just some sort of “working class” thing, I went to Northwestern University, where you might expect racial incidents to be non-existent, being a respected institution of higher learning, and whose student body is at least half comprised of people from what I would label as the upper middle class. Yet, incidents like this happen. Or the white kids who thought it might be funny to dress in blackface for Halloween. And that was after I had graduated. While I was there in the mid-90s, there were a host of racial incidents that resulted in the formation of a task force to address these issues.
So, disabuse yourself of the notion that this is somehow limited to white working class folk.
That’s encouraging. But some weren’t, so the greater point stands.
The OP is claiming that because “chink” is not always offensive in every context, then it is acceptable in this context. Or something like that.
Last I checked, he was saying its use as a slur is so rare and obscure that it’s understandable a professional journalist wouldn’t know about it, and practically nobody on Twitter recognized it either until a few people explained it, and the obscurity and the fact that only some people saw the slur mean ESPN shouldn’t have fired Federico over it because the firing ruins his career.
It could be either explanation. Every time I ask about it, all he says is something like “Homonym! Duh!!”, so I guess it is up to the reader to come up with their own interpretation of what that means.
Beats me. The fact that it’s a homonym isn’t in dispute and isn’t the issue anyway.
Classic ad homonym.
But showing off newfangled and obscure terms like “homonym” is always important!
I can’t figure out how the homonym part even helps anyone’s argument. One of the ways in which adept users of the language convey meaning is through words with lots of different definitions and nuances. And one of the ways sophisticated readers should glean meaning is through hearing the echoes of those various definitions. Reading shouldn’t be traveling from tree to tree, but actually walking into the forest.
You’re either still struggling to parse meaning in text, or you’re deliberately mischaracterising my point. As I’ve been saying all along, I can’t read minds so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain it again.
I have never said or implied that if the headline said, for instance “Chink Struggles As Lin’s Knicks Lose To Hornets” that I would have either shrugged that off, or quizzically wondered “gee, why are they calling Lin a ‘chip or missing piece’? I don’t get it”. It would have been immediately obvious, within milliseconds, that they were using an ethnic slur (albeit one I would have considered archaic, like “spade” or “coolie”). No one would have had to explain its meaning to me. I don’t think I’ve ever said differently; but if I was unclear, hopefully that clears that up.
But I think (and here’s maybe a new way to state it that I haven’t tried before) it’s weird for us to have headlines that are okay (and not even odd) to use about players of certain races but not others. Had Lin been a white player from Harvard who was barely warming the bench, and then suddenly broke out the way he did, I can easily see the same headline being used (this is where we’ve seen a lot of disagreement, but that really was a common sports metaphor and it really does fit the situation, where a shooting star suffers his first setback), and obviously no one would see it as racist and (again, I strongly believe) no one would think it was a strange choice of words either. Whereas with the N word or other non-homonym slurs, they are never acceptable.
So I don’t think it makes sense to have this double standard, where we have to be conscious of the race of athletes to tailour headlines around them in a positive manner. Which means, if the software I described is really so impractical (it’s been years since I learned C++ but that strikes me as very defeatist in a world where we have Watson crushing Jeopardy champs), then we should at least have news outlets spellcheckers flagged to highlight not only “chink” (regardless of context) but also “gobbledygook” etc. just like that columnist suggested. Surely that’s not an extreme endeavour? Anyway, then we just stop using them regardless of the race of anyone in the article, how about that?