[sarcasm] Please email a mod and have your post deleted. It is offensive. (Your post is offensive to me, and therefore, by your logic, offensive.) Surely you don’t have a problem with such an offensive post being removed … [/sarcasm]
The gas used by the Nazis, from what I understand, was Zyklon B. The Umbro product was not called Zyklon B. Zyklon means cyclone in German. It means that in German whether it is said in Germany or not. If someone is ignorant of what it means, that is their failing and they do not have the right to be upset over a word they don’t understand.
If Zyklon meant “Death to Jews” in German, then it would be offensive inside and outside of the German-speaking world. It means “cyclone”, and is inoffensive inside and outside the German-speaking world., unless the concept of a meteorological event is offensive.
No one is saying that its their private, exclusive word. Imagine that I decide all by myself that “Nike” means “gory dismemberment” and get all worked up about it and write angry letters to the Nike Corporation demanding that they change their name. I will, rightfully, be ignored. No one gets to decide all by himself what a word means.
But for millions of people in the English-speaking world Zyklon has one meaning – the gas that the Nazi’s used to kill the Jews. It’s not one person arbitrarily assigning his own meaning to the word – it’s a well-known word to large numbers of people. Just because you hadn’t heard it before doesn’t mean that it’s not common knowledge to lots of other people.
An example: A few years ago I was working for a company that ran an ad that inadvertently used an image of the Motel Lorraine – the motel in Memphis where Dr. King was assassinated. Worse, the perspective was from James Earl Ray’s sniper roost.
It was an ad for a police-themed video game. What seemed to have happened was the producer gave all of his hundreds of reference images to the ad agency. These included lots of shots of real cops in action as well as famous crime scenes. The producer knew what the image meant, but the artist at the agency just thought it was an innocuous background.
Fortunately one of my colleagues spotted it. Even if most people can’t immediately recognize the Motel Lorraine, he could, and if he could there were sure to be others. Fortunately it hadn’t gone into wide circulation yet and we immediately pulled it. If any one of the few thousand people who did see it was offended, we never heard about it. But we were all appalled that it had run at all and if we had been called on it we were prepared to make a lengthy and abject apology.
Whether the post is labelled offensive or not by a reader means nothing unless the moderator agrees that it is. This is the problem some ISPs have now; do they remove a website on receipt of a complaint (say, libel) or investigate it further? Unfortunately the law in the UK seems weighted towards the former.
One question: if the ‘c’-word (not to offend anyone) meant, say, ‘home’ in another language, and came to be used as a brand name worldwide, would you still say that nobody has the right to be upset over its use as a brand name? I am honestly not trying to make a snide point, but genuinely curious as to your answer.
Whether the post is labelled offensive or not by a reader means nothing unless the moderator agrees that it is. This is the problem some ISPs have now; do they remove a website on receipt of a complaint (say, libel) or investigate it further? Unfortunately the law in the UK seems weighted towards the former.
One question: if the ‘c’-word (not to offend anyone) meant, say, ‘home’ in another language, and came to be used as a brand name worldwide, would you still say that nobody has the right to be upset over its use as a brand name? I am honestly not trying to make a snide point, but genuinely curious as to your answer.
Okay, BlackKnight, let’s say that a rope company in a non-English speaking country randomly decided to name their next line of rope as the “NiggerLyncher.” They didn’t know what it meant in English, but figured it sounded cool, and went along with their “Ni” based products. Is it wrong if a black American finds this offensive in any way? Or is it wrong to offended, because no offense was meant?
I did say: “unless there was a reason to believe that the company deliberately set out to offend people.”
Does everyone know, to a high degree of accuracy, that it was chosen randomly and just a weird fluke? If yes, then no they should not be offended. If not, then they could reasonably conclude that it was chosen to offend. (After all, the situation you describe is so absurd it is almost impossible that it would happen by chance.)
There are also a couple of problems with your example. One, you have your example be a rope manufacturer. That would be analagous if the product formerly known as Zyklon were a type of gas or poison, but it’s not. It’s a shoe.
Secondly, “NiggerLyncher” is not a standard word for something (relatively) benign, like cyclone. To be analogous, you’d have to also state that such a term meant “hurricane” or “typhoon” in some language.
But really, if you have to resort to such extremes to try to come up with counter-examples then I think that’s a sign my principle works pretty well.
I did say: “unless there was a reason to believe that the company deliberately set out to offend people.”
Does everyone know, to a high degree of accuracy, that it was chosen randomly and just a weird fluke? If yes, then no they should not be offended. If not, then they could reasonably conclude that it was chosen to offend. (After all, the situation you describe is so absurd it is almost impossible that it would happen by chance.)
There are also a couple of problems with your example. One, you have your example be a rope manufacturer. That would be analagous if the product formerly known as Zyklon were a type of gas or poison, but it’s not. It’s a shoe.
Secondly, “NiggerLyncher” is not a standard word for something (relatively) benign, like cyclone. To be analogous, you’d have to also state that such a term meant “hurricane” or “typhoon” in some language.
But really, if you have to resort to such extremes to try to come up with counter-examples then I think that’s a sign my principle works pretty well.
The meaning of a word is what the hearer understands, and whether anyone is upset by a word will depend on what he understands by it, not what the person speaking the word meant. It is reasonable for me, or anyone else, to ask a manufacturer not to market a product under the name “cunt”; this is true whether or not the manufacturer knows what the word “cunt” signifies to me or others.
I am not saying that the manufacturer is guilty of a moral failing here; he may be, if he intended to upset people or if he was indifferent to whether he upset people or not, but even if he was entirely innocent the word still upsets me, and I am not being unreasonable in asking him to stop using it.
I am possibly being unreasonable if the upsetting meaning is unique to me, or to a very small group of people, or if the upset is trivial. But none of this can be said about the word “Zyklon”.
Reason it this way; if the manufacture was aware at the outset of what the word conveyed, should he use it? I think most people would say “no”. If he was not aware, but becomes aware, should he stop using it? I think he should. And, if it right that he should not use a word that he knows to be upsetting, how can it be wrong for me, or anyone else, to point out to him that it is upsetting and ask him to stop using it?
"A year ago, Bosch Siemens Hausgeraete (BSH), the firm’s consumer products joint venture, filed two applications with the US Patent & Trademark Office for the Zyklon name across a range of home products, including gas ovens.
Jewish groups have condemned the move, in particular because Siemens used slave labour during the Nazi period. "
I admit, having a rope manufacturer with a product name such as in my example is errant. I change the product to a toaster with the name of “Nigger,” which, for argument’s sake, is a name for a local form of small oven in Thailand. I still stand by my premise, namely that it is only natural for someone to get offended over offensive content, whether it was intended to be or not.
If someone links to a graphic porn site, and another person who detests porn on the premise of being offensive accidentally mistakes the link and goes there, is it wrong for them to find that porn offensive? I think not.
Finally, the reason I resorted to the previous extreme was not becuase your argument is so infallible that I had to resort to something so surreal, but was actually because I was just reinforcing my point with hyperbole in order to demonstrate how far your logic can go.
And for millions more, it has no meaning at all. I didn’t know what Zyklon was untill a couple days ago. Now I know it’s A: german for cyclone, and B: a pesticide used in german concentration camps.
I was kinda undecided on this subject, untill I thought of mustard. Then it just seemed a little absurd (Not a lot, but a little).
Darkie Toothpaste, available in east Asian countries, wasn’t an accident. The English name was changed to “Darlie” a few years ago after Colgate acquired the brand, but the Chinese name remains “Haak Yahn Nga Gou” … “Black Man Toothpaste” translated into English.
Has anyone ever complained about Heil dump trucks? What about Spic and Span?
Well it could be worse. I mean it’s not like they called them the “final solution” for fitness.(Still this thread reminds me that a wrestling league a few years ago actually had a wrestler called “The final solution” and didn’t realize the connotation)
You’re assuming your conclusion here - namely, that the content is offensive. I claim that whether or not something is offensive is at least partially a function of the intentions of those involved.
I think a more analogous case would be if they mistakenly clicked on the link and then were offended by the link being there in the first place and wanted it removed.
If they hadn’t made the mistake, they wouldn’t have been offended. Likewise, if one doesn’t make the mistake of thinking the product name Zyklon means “the gas that was used by Nazis to kill millions” instead of “cyclone”, then one wouldn’t be offended. If the only reason one is offended is because one has made a mistake, then I don’t think one has a very good case for claiming that the purported cause of offense is truly offensive.
[wild tangent]
One can create extreme situations to test any such theory, but this practice has a limited use. Usually its use is something like this: Set up a situation that is extreme or complicated in some way. Claim that it is intuitively obvious that some property of the situation is true. Show how by following a particular principle, one must accept the opposite of this intuitively obvious result. Conclude that the principle cannot hold.
(This is something like what philosopher Daniel Dennet calls an “intuition pump”.)
The problem is that by setting up an extreme or complicated situation, one thereby gives up any claim that intuition can be used as the sole guide to evaluating that situation. I readily admit that as soon as I read your example about the poorly named rope product, my intuition started yelling, “My god, that’s offensive for sure!” But I don’t think my intuition can be very accurate in such a situation. It’s so bizarre a thing for a company to come up with a name like that purely innocently that I cannot trust my intuition to accurately evaluate such a situation.
[/wild tangent]
And millions of English-speaking people don’t know that “syzygy” means “the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system”. But that’s nevertheless what it means, regardless of how many people don’t know it.
And regardless of how many English-speaking people don’t know what “Zyklon B” means, its sole English meaning is “the gas that the Nazis used to kill Jews.” And many English-speakers are aware of that meaning. That is what “Zyklon” means here, when it’s used at all.
There’s no particular need, IMHO, to attach ‘good’ meanings to Zyklon. George Carlin tells us that there are 400,000 words in the English language. (399,993…and seven. But I digress.) And there’s a near-infinitude of possible made-up words. Other than for references to the mechanics of the Holocaust, there’s no reason why ‘Zyklon’ can’t lie fallow for a couple of centuries.
I’d take the use of ‘Zyklon’ in ads and stuff pretty personally, just as I expect a Japanese person might be offended if I marketed an alternative to Jolt Cola under the name “Nagasaki Nuke”. “Oh, but I just wanted a name that would convey high energy…”