Yes, that specific example is a lot harder to swallow than the other two. I can’t see any non-racist reason to object to that one. The others were clearly tricks, and you can see why a reasonable person might object to them, but assume that “Arabic numerals” really are something in a foreign language (as clearly people assumed)… Explain how that was supposed to be bad?!
Another example is when people started a petition to “end women’s suffrage”. People hear that, don’t know what “suffrage” means and think it’s the same thing as “suffering”, and unknowingly sign a petition to remove the right for women to vote. That’s clearly a “ha ha, we tricked you” situation worth a chuckle, but at least the people signing it had good intentions.
I see absolutely no good intentions on the part of people objecting to “Arabic numerals”.
And if you signed a petition to ban something that you didn’t even know what it was, then yes, you’re stupid. If someone asks you “Do you want to ban use of Arabic numerals in schools?”, and you reply “I dunno, what’s that?”, that’s fine. If you reply “Hah, hah, what a joke, can you believe some folks don’t know what Arabic numerals are?”, that’s fine, too. Even if you reply “No, they should use Roman numerals, just like God and Caesar intended”, then… Well, OK, you’re probably crazy, but it’s still not stupid. But if you reply “Well, I don’t know what that is, but it sounds scary, and so I want to ban it without finding out anything about it”, then that’s stupid.
The specific point of the dihydrogen monoxide one isn’t just point and laugh, although I admit that’s part of it. It’s to point out that the general populace has almost no understanding of chemistry, and maybe we (and by extension, our politicians) should listen to experts and not the people screaming about banning fluoride in the water and chemtrails and chemicals turning the frogs gay.
An elementary school in South Carolina is facing backlash after pictures of staff in “Border Patrol” T-shirts surfaced on the district’s Facebook page.
Surely that was to show support for a federal law enforcement agency, right? What? It was part of a professional development day?
Florence 1 Schools posted the images, which have since been taken down, with two staff members wearing gray “Border Patrol” T-shirts during a Hispanic heritage celebration event held on Wednesday.
And they thought this is the way to celebrate Hispanic heritage?
The glyphs used to write Arabic numbers are somewhat dissimilar to what we use,
it appears that we call our numbers “Arabic” because the arrangement of the glyphs is the same, and unlike Roman numbers. Also, it appears, from this image, that “million” is a word stolen directly from Arabic
Here is a chart showing the evolution of Arabic numerals (courtesy of Wikipedia):
What we use today came from the Western Arabic (or Gobar) above. It is split off from Eastern Arabic, which looks much closer to the examples you gave.
Nearly ten years ago I was kvetching about the word “monokini” for a topless bikini. It’s a portmanteau of the Greek prefix “mono-” “one” with the toponym “bikini” (from Micronesian “pikinni”), via an implied Latin prefix “bi-” “two”!
I still think that word really ought to be “unikini”.
When I did my sailing trip, the ship had a couple of small boats on davits that it could launch. One of them was called a “monomoy”. I spent weeks trying to figure out what a moy was, and why that boat would only have one of them.
