[QUOTE=CanvasShoes]
What I can’t figure out is where or when you think a person would need to address a native by their correct native corporation at all? For instance, you’d just say “Hi George and Gladys Henry, nice to meet you” or whatever (Henry being a rather popular last name among some corporations, and super old-fashioned first names being pretty popular amongst natives as well). You’re not going to walk up and say, “Saaaaaay, you’re an inupiat aren’t you?” Or “Hi there Inupiat!” anymore than you’d walk up to a black or hispanic person and address them by their nationality, or race.
[/QUOTE]
I can’t imagine addressing anyone by their ethnic nomenclature, but I have certainly encountered discussions about ethnic groups. Anything from talking about the relative culinary offerings at Irish or Slovenian cultural festivals to the prevalence of Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazim and French Canadians. People tend to cluster in groups (some of which shift and change, gather and dissolve), and to the extent that they have group identities, it is much more convenient to refer to them by name than to say “I really like the food that originated in the land South of the Baltic Sea among the people who carved out the moderately large kingdom, there, before it was threatened by Asian cavalry, then then successively (and alternately) dominated by the large empires to the East and South while suffering periodic attack by people from the peninsula to the Northwest and, later, the people to the West and most recenly by the empire to the East, again.” It is much simpler to say “I like Polish food.”
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
[Quote=Frank]
Wait. Wait!
I am horribly, intensely, and, I’m afraid, inextricably confused.
[/quote]
That’s the general idea. The purpose of all this is not to enlighten, but to accommodate the perpetual capacity for offence to be taken.
[/QUOTE]
It probably appears that way to those more removed. Have you called any Northumbrians “Scot” lately?
As noted, earlier, distant people will assign names based on characteristics that they perceive that may be fairly inaccurate when inspected more closely. The habit throughout the Commonwealth to refer to citizens of the U.S. as “Yanks” (while downplayed as a silly mistake, these days), was a source of serious offense to a number of Alabamans, Texans, and Mississippians during WWI and WWII. Those soldiers had ancestors, some of whom lived long enough for the soldiers to know, who had expended a lot of energy and suffered a lot of tribulation fighting “Yankees” (or dam’yankees) and they did not enjoy being identified by the name they associated with aggression against their homes. (Of course, many of them and their actual Yankee fellow soldiers reciprocated the insult by referring to Scots and Welsh as “English.”)
So, when a bunch of European invaders wander into the countryside assigning names to people, it really is not that difficult to figure out why, once those people had access to modern venues of communication, they might want to let other people know the names they use for themselves.
This does not mean that there are no people who make too much of such issues. And it certainly does not mean that some well-intentioned people cannot get their facts wrong, making the matter even worse. (Examples are easily found in the thread that prompted this one and the early posts, here.)
However, to write off the whole discussion as one of seeking to take offense is to take the actions of a few loud persons and ascribe their motives to everyone in the discussion.
