Over in ATMB, a sidetrack started in one of the threads, discussing whether the term “Brit” is offensive to British people. That got me thinking. For some countries/areas, there are distinct adjective and noun forms, e.g.:
Turkish person = Turk
Spanish person = Spaniard
Scottish person = Scot
For others, the same word functions as both adjective and noun (oddly enough, all of the examples that pop to mind end in -an):
Canadian person = Canadian
Mexican person = Mexican
German person = German
Russian person = Russian
But for many, it seems like there is no noun form, so we come up with nicknames. If I were to say, “I saw an English yesterday,” the first response would be “an English what?” Are there regularly-accepted inoffensive nouns for English people? Swiss? French?
I’m talking about words that would be clear in the sentence “I saw a(n) _____.” Non-gender-specific plain singular nouns (I don’t want to resort to appending “-man” or “-woman” to make Englishman or Frenchman).
Limeys, Toblerone-munchers and cheese-eating surrender monkeys not good enough for you?
Seriously, though, “Swiss” is used as a noun, but for English and French you’re stuck with Englishman, Frenchwoman etc. “Englander” is used, but only in phrases such as “little Englander” which are used pejoratively.
To just defend myself from any charges of being oversensitive, I don’t find Brit offensive generally. It has been used to me in times and places and ways it was offensive, though. I do find its use by Americans to be often patronizing & annoying.
As for a noun, Englishman or ‘someone from England’ work pretty well. The first is even fewer syllables than American, and no one seems to think that is too long to say. If you want non gender specific, use English person/person from England.
I figured there would be regional differences on some of these. I can pretty much guarantee if I said something about “a Swiss” around here, people would say, “a Swiss what?” Where I used to live, “Korean” was both noun and adjective, but I’ve talked to people in other parts of the U.S. that know it only as an adjective.
“Englishman” just feels awkward to me, especially if I’m trying to use a plural to refer to a mixed-gender group.
That is helpful when speaking of the people as a whole, but “I saw the Chinese yesterday” has a rather different implication than “I saw a Chinese person yesterday.”
What other really weird “people from” terms are there? In the olden days when the Transvaal was a province, we were called “vaalies” and universally hated. Now I live in Gauteng, and we’re less universally called “gauties” - or maybe it’s just the people I know - and hated just as much.
In the spirit of skirting too close to the edge like this, threads like this one always take me to the “person from Massachusetts = Masshole” meme I only first heard about when I started living on the East Coast as an adult…don’t mean to offend, and I certainly don’t use this - it just gave me a chuckle when I first heard it…
(hijack - by the way Descamisado, I dig the band BR 549, whom I assume you are referring to in your title - great old school country with some wonderful pedal steel work…)
Truth be told, calling someone a New Yorker always makes me think there must be some activity called “New Yorking,” and what it might be. It might be anything, really, as New Yorkers are not so much human beings as human doings.
Not exclusively Newcastle (those would be Novocastrians) – Geordies are generally reckoned to come from Tyneside and the surrounding area. Not too broad an area though, we prefer not to be confused with Mackems, Smoggies and Monkey Hangers (and vice versa).
Not bothered by Brit, though – I’ll admit I’ve occasionally inferred a bit of an attitude behind its use by some Americans, but it’s the attitude that seems offensive, not the epithet.
