My excuse is that what I specifically said was that I didn’t know the precise meaning of “antebellum” and therefore would not have associated it with plantations and if one doesn’t know that “antebellum” is associated with plantations , one also would not have known the word had any connection with slavery. If I had seen a photo of a big white house labelled as an “antebellum mansion” , I would have assumed it belonged to a wealthy person. If I had thought about it , I might have decided that that wealthy person was probably a plantation owner - but that still wouldn’t have told me that the word “antebellum” is associated with plantations and apparently wouldn’t have been used for a mansion owned by someone who became wealthy in some other way or one that wasn’t located on a former plantation. It doesn’t mean I didn’t know that plantations are associated with slavery.
You have somehow constructed a whole story about things you think I don’t know because I had only the vaguest idea of the meaning of one particular word ( that I have not encountered all that often)
I associated the word with the pre-war South and its Latin sound gave me the impression that it was a bit wrapped up in the “Lost Cause” sentiment. I wasn’t specifically aware of the term “antebellum architecture” but I just googled it now and I would’ve assumed most of those homes were plantation homes likely built on the foundation of a slavery-dependent economy.
That being said, these aren’t things I inherently knew and some of them I didn’t learn until adulthood. Like doreen, I would’ve noted these large homes as just belonging to rich Southerners, and it probably would’ve taken me a few minutes of thought to connect that to slavery. Since I’ve never lived in the South, I don’t see or hear about these homes hardly at all, so it becomes one of those “out of sight, out of mind” type things.
I visited a distant relative in Atlanta several years ago and I was shocked (yes, that’s the word) that many new communities included “plantation” in their names. In my mind, that word carried even more baggage than antebellum and I still can’t believe people would actually call their new housing developments something like that.
As someone who has had to deal with sexist crap since childhood I find nothing amusing or funny about it. If you say you’re having “unclean thoughts” about a woman I will assume you find her sexually desirable. Which gets into why anyone would think sex is automatically unclean, but the point is that there was absolutely nothing in your post to make the casual reader think you were joking.
I don’t care if you find a woman sexually desirable. That’s a normal thing for either a hetersexual male or a homoesexual female, or for bisexuals or pan sexuals. I don’t find that offensive.
Why I do find weird to the point of creepy is you are now insisting that it was all a “joke”. Yeah, right.
Anyhow, maybe I’m the only white northerner who, upon first hearing Lady Antebellum’s name, though “WTF would anyone name themselves something meaning the pre-Civil War South?” Then I was also confused as hell because the music they made didn’t actually sound like the bunch of bigoted rednecks I was expecting. If they were doing pop-country WTF did they adopt such an off-putting name?
Then again, I actually paid attention in history class. And had a decent history teacher. A lot of people didn’t.
And, you know what, I do find that believable. A huge number of people in the US do not know in the first place what the *word *“antebellum” itself even means, never mind what’s the association involved. And certainly there are many who at best only know it as just an architectural style, like saying Georgian or Neogothic or Bauhaus, having learned it divorced of context.
And yes it is possible for someone to never have felt the need to go looking for that context and subtext. When people are in a position to not need to look out for how or whether language is hurting them, the usual default position is they don’t.
That said…
I too found it kind of peculiar.
Then again I believe the Dixie Chicks have been brought up. I suppose they could have been cutely trying to play off of the earlier act’s moniker.
Because at some point, in their environment and around the audiences they wereplaying to it was ***not *** as off-putting – as seen by the sales and the pop crossover. And look at the way you describe your own expectation of hearing “bigoted rednecks” just from the use of the word – most of the population simply is not so conditioned. Heck, I did not expect bigoted rednecks, just mostly because most of those I’ve met couldn’t even spell “antebellum”…
[Moderating]
OK, let me make this an official moderator instruction:
Bijou Drains, we do not need to hear about your “unclean thoughts”, sincere or joking. Any further discussion of this point in this thread will lead to a Warning.
Even though I do know what the word means I see it so infrequently I have to pause and remember which period it is referring. I may have thought it meant the period right after the war at some point. I don’t know, maybe around here they don’t make any effort to pretty up that period of time with fancy words.
If I were to decide to use the word in a band name it would be my responsibility to understand all the connotations of the word. Maybe some good is coming out of it. For a few people their vocabulary is expanding by one word.
Agreed, but I’m not sure that they made a wise choice of name.
Am I the only one who, when they saw the title of this thread, thought “Lady A–hole? What’s this thread about?” And that still pops into my head each time I see it. Did they not focus-group the new name?
Ah, OK, I was wondering about that. When I lived in Montana, the University hosted an annual pow-wow (which I kept on meaning to visit but never got around to). But it was put on by actual Native American tribesmembers.
CAF, the group that likes to fly around warbirds, used to stand for Confederate Air Force. I think it was tongue in cheek – it was founded in Texas, everybody’s rank was Colonel, and it motto was Semper, Mint Julep.
In 2002 the name was changed to Commemorative Air Force.
Right, if you are referring to an *actual *PowWow it’s no problem. If the loanword’s referring to the very thing that defines it in the original context, that’s not appropriation. It’s just using a loanword.
So of course “borscht” is not going to be excluded. Unless, I suppose, you are using it to refer to some concoction completely unrelated to a borscht.
OTOH at the next symposium I attend I am going to insist wine be consumed during the proceedings, in order to honor the origin.
I’m a white Californian, an I immediately went ‘hmm, I dunno, what are they trying to say with that name,’ but I’m open to reserving judgement until I’d reviewed their catalogue and presentation. Same way I reacted to The Civil Wars, although nothing I’ve seen in their catalogue and presentation makes me think Lost Causers.
They are obviously not around anymore but the most disgusting band name of all time is Joy Division. Whenever those fucking cretins have been asked about the name in interviews, as far as I have seen, they just crack a joke about it. They knew exactly what it meant when they formed the band.