Ha, this is funny considering at least one person mocked the fact that I just learned the term (from my English prof friend) the other day. Getting hit from both sides on that one!
Getting back to those who do hear “chink” regularly used as a slur and so are more attuned to react to it as such: it sounds like you are less condemnatory toward people in your daily lives using it as an unambiguous slur than you are toward a guy who used a homonym of it in what both he and his boss insist was an innocent fashion. I don’t get that. If I heard someone saying that kind of thing around me, I’d tell them off in no uncertain terms. It may be too that people kind of sense that about me which is why I don’t ever hear it said around me, and that’s a good thing IMO. If more people had that attitude, these words really could be driven further into obscurity, except maybe in pockets where the coarsely racist make up the vast majority.
I really don’t understand how anyone can think chink as a slur has fallen into disuse. All my fellow Asian friends have heard it at least once in their lives.
It’s nice to know that you are so unafraid of standing up for what you believe in, but when I’m walking down the street of a rough neighborhood and someone shouts a racist slur at me, I’m not going to stop and confront him about it. I would rather live to tell the tale, you know?
Context counts in language. Hence things like “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” In this case, “flies” means two different things, and its entirely appropriate for people to interpret words based on context. When the subject matter is an asian-american, “chink” is an ethnic slur and any professional writer should know better than to use it. Should he have been fired? Yes. Should he be banished to the wastelands? No. He will survive and hopefully be more careful in the future.
Depending on how old they are, though, that could still be the case (although I believe people who say they have heard it recently; but there are still some of us who have not found it to pop up in the 21st century). My best friend heard it a few times as the only Asian kid in the 1970s in a rural area in the Midwest. But not in the past three decades, a fairly long time. This country has seen a lot of social change in that time: a black president, for instance, would have been unthinkable even when Jesse Jackson was piling up delegates as essentially a protest candidate in the 1980s.
I hear you. But I was referring more to people who say they hear it from family members or acquaintances, and in more upscale environments. In a rough neighbourhood, from menacing strangers, I agree.
I don’t know what you are rebutting here. I’ve never said you would have reacted that way. I’ve said you are wrong that it is archaic, and more importantly, you are wrong that a journalist should not be expected to be aware of it. Do you not understand this concept? Journalists need to pay more attention to their words than you do. It is a position of greater responsibility and scrutiny, not one where “basic literacy” is all that is called for. And it doesn’t matter if people had to have the connection pointed out to them.
Maybe it is weird for humans to have insults that only apply to certain groups of people, but we do have those insults. If there weren’t an Asian-American player involved, nobody would have seen a second meaning in “chink.” That’s not new or unexpected information. Context counts.
The standard is “avoid terms that could be construed as racial slurs in the context of the story.” So there is no double standard; it’s one standard. It would apply to different words in different contexts, but that doesn’t make it a double standard.
News outlets don’t use special spellcheckers. They do have style guides and they have editors who are supposed to look out for possible problems.
What’s weird about that? Some words have very different meanings, depending on the context in which they’re used. If there’s more than one applicable context, the meaning of the word becomes ambiguous. When meaning is ambiguous, it devolves upon the audience to determine which meaning was intended. When one of the possible contexts is highly offensive, some people are going to assume the offensive context was operative. Being aware of this sort of thing is extremely important for any journalist, as one of the things a journalist is supposed to avoid is ambiguity. An ambiguous headline is bad, even when it doesn’t have a potentially offensive interpretation. If it does have a potentially offensive interpretation, it can - and should - have serious career repercussions.
This isn’t even some special, onerous burden we place solely on our journalists. The context in which one is speaking is something that should (and for most people, is) be on everyone’s minds whenever they open their mouths. I presume you use different language when talking with your friends, versus when talking with your parents, versus when talking with your SO. People who work in the public eye have an additional context they need to be aware of, is all.
It would be trivially easy to write software that would do that. Hell, you could get the same effect just by editing your spellcheck dictionary. Why bother, though? The vast, vast majority of journalists don’t have any problem writing headlines without “accidentally” including common racial slurs.
That’s a pretty crappy idea. “Chink” serves a useful, non-derogatory role in language. There’s no reason to chuck it over the side just because one numbnuts sports writer fucked up and lost his job.
On a slightly different topic: you keep insisting that “chink” is some archaic slur, almost unheard of in modern days. If that’s the case, what word has replaced it? When someone wishes to insult someone’s Asian ancestry in the 21st century, what word would you expect them to use? Or is it your position that people are so non-racist towards Asians these days that there is no contemporary slur for them?
Context is important though. “Chink” isn’t associated with white people, so why would people make that connection or get up in arms about it? It’s not nearly as blatant and using it in an article focused on an Asian guy who, I remind you again, has been hot news in large part because of his race and background. It’s extremely poor judgment.
Touching on the program stuff a bit:
As someone who knows how to code, it’s trivially easy to take a list such as List of ethnic slurs - Wikipedia and sanity-check the output. The problem is that most slurs are pretty specific and lack innocuous homonyms. Most of the words that DO have innocuous homonyms are words that don’t typically fit too well in idiomatic phrases you’d use in reporting anyway. The ones that do can be counted on two hands at best and don’t really justify rolling out a program, especially since most people know those slurs anyway. Journalists should hopefully, as writers, be better equipped when it comes to such awareness anyway. A lot of it is common sense.
It’s not so much that it’d be hard to implement – it’d just be needlessly annoying and useless – a wasted cost. Do I really need a program to flag words like “chink”? If you have to roll out that kind of program for your writers, you have shitty writers. It’s like suggesting that surgeons need to listen to The Bone Song or something before they go into surgery and that it’s not a big deal to implement the musical training. If a surgeon seriously does not know that the foot bone is connected to the ankle bone, I’d expect his career to be rather short-lived.
I bet Frederico is thankful that he changed the original headline he came up with.
**
Chink In The Armor**: Chink’s 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks In Streak-Snapping Loss To Hornets.
Well, you know, that and the fact that both he and his boss strenuously insist that he was not.
But okay: you were being drily sarcastic–and you think that dry sarcasm from strangers is easily communicated in written form online? That is notoriously not the case. I’d add that your sarcasm seems misplaced here, since I’d be wiling to wager a lot of money on the proposition that the percentage of American adults who can correctly define the word “homonym” (including the fact that it does not properly include homophones that are spelled differently) is in the single digits, and not likely the high single digits. So for you to post what you did as arch mockery, conveys far more elitism than any that can be pinned on me.
Great, that’s what I figured. As for the idea that since there are such a small number of them that are okay in non-racial contexts: great–make a list of those and tape them up if you don’t want to add them to the checker. Just stop people using them altogether, like the columnist I linked to said. I find that sort of absurd, but upon reflection it’s probably the “least worst” way to go.
I still fear though that we are opening up a can of worms with this. One of the words on there is “dink”. Now, “dink and dunk” is another hoary sports cliche. Is that now going to be off limits? What about “mock”? And while we’re at it, why the fuck is it still okay for “Redskins” to be the name of the football team in our nation’s capital? Isn’t that a thousand times worse than the great “chink in the armor” scandal of 2012? Where’s the proportion?
Oh, and someone asked if I was British. No, I am not–I’m American, although I was born overseas and I’m the only member of my nuclear family (that is, the one I grew up in) who currently resides in the U.S. Yes, I use many British/Canadian spellings, a habit I started when George Bush was president and I was loath to be instantly tagged as an American in multinational online forums. I also think they look nicer. Is that a problem?
This sort of misses the point though. You don’t need this kind of list. A lot of the nastier ones are just common sense to most people.
A writer’s ability is more than just being able to avoid using slurs. There are many innate qualities and skills to a good writer, and judgment is by no means limited to a mere word list. It’s about assessing context and judging psychological impact, which is by no means a hard-edge objective thing to pull off with some algorithm or computer program.
As for the Redskins issue, it has generated plenty of debate.
The difference, though, is that a great deal of Native Americans (via multiple studies) didn’t even find the phrase offensive, and there has been a lot of ambiguity/debate as to whether or not it’s even considered a disparaging label to begin with.
In other words, “chink” is a lot more controversial than “redskin.” If you named your team “The California Chinks” you can guarantee that would be burned down and rejected in an unholy firestorm within moments.
You might be right about that. I find that most people use “homonym” in the non-technical sense that covers either homographs or homophones. That said, this is a distinction we learned in elementary school, but most folks I run across seem to use homonym where homophone might be better. (So much so that “homophone” is definition 1a. for “homonym” in Merriam-Webster, and “homograph” is 1b.) Regardless, “homonym” in and of itself is not an obscure term. Whether somebody knows/remembers the technical definition or the non-technical one is another matter.
You’ve yet to give a solid explanation of why this opens a can of worms.
People do complain about sometimes, and more recently there’s been a debate about Native American college sports mascots. (They have essentially been banned by the NCAA, which runs college sports.) Names like Redskins continue to exist for a couple of simple reasons: most people aren’t very upset by them because they’re used to them, and the people who are offended by them haven’t been able to get the public on board with any campaign to change the names, so the franchises have not seen any reason to change them. It’s not much of an explanation, but that seems to be the state of affairs.
Yeah, I know that; but it shouldn’t even be a debate. There shouldn’t be any team in professional sports that uses that name–but for it to be (a) the team that represents our nation’s capital and (b) the team that remained racially segregated longer than any other professional team in either football or baseball (though the Red Sox gave them a run for their money).
BTW, my wife is an alumna of the University of North Dakota, which is still in the dying throes of resisting the NCAA edict on “Indian” mascots. She is a liberal sociologist as I’ve mentioned, and always hated the name; but she knows a lot of people (including some relatives) who support keeping the nickname. My somewhat heated exchange with her brother and his friends on Facebook about it is about as close as I’ve gotten to the experience some of you have with having acquaintances or family members who say “chink” as a racial slur; but I’m not sure how close that is still (I can’t imagine any of her family members calling an Asian person “chink”, certainly).
And there’s a segue back to the topic of this thread: I actually hope those of you who believe the “chink in the armor” reference was an intentional racially motivated pun are right. If you are, no injustice has been done and I don’t mind if Federico’s career is over. And stubborn though I may appear to be, I’d say my estimation of the probability that you all are right has been increased by about 300 percent due to the testimony here (some of you are more credible and persuasive than others though, that’s for sure).
At the same time, I still think there’s about an 80 percent chance it really was an innocent mistake (down from 95 percent when I started the thread); and I still believe in “innocent until proven guilty” and giving people the benefit of the doubt. That’s my policy for people accused of crimes, and it’s my belief about people in the workplace (I do not go for that “at will” line, but that’s a subject for another thread).
I’m an atheist, so the Jesus-y stuff makes me throw up in my mouth a little; but I do think it tends to undercut the idea that he was smirkingly making a racial double entendre or pun. As such I think he needs to be put in an entirely different category than, for instance, that “ching chong ting tong ling long” girl.
It’s how you prevent slurs from co-opting your entire language, while avoiding the impression that you are choosing the slur to describe someone.
It is unavoidable, if you use a slur-homonym in an article about someone who would be the target of the slur, people will wonder if you did it deliberately. Those questions are bad publicity, and an editors job is to avoid approving articles/headlines that will generate bad publicity.
Not a problem, just another wierd thing, especially for a wannabe copy editor. Learning that it’s just a pretentious affectation makes perfect sense.
Thanks for the quote from the guy himself. Notice what argument he doesn’t make? In fact, he describes it as a “lapse in judgement.” He’s not claiming that he never heard the fusty old term, nor is he denying that he should have been responsible.