Since the word kike has changed in meaning from its origin (see Lute’s response to your question) and may be in the process of changing again, I am not in a position to answer your question. The term is not used around me by people I know. But even if it were, Zev and CMKeller and the user of the word would be the ones to decide what meaning they would bring to it.
Remember how the word queer until recent years was unspoken in polite company?
Are you saying that when I teasingly call one of my women friends a bitch that I’m actually insulting her? Then why does it make her laugh?
On the Fourth of July the Redcoat that joined our family on the boat actually referred to me as a “Yank”! (Gasp!) My family has been in the South since the 1600’s. Should I have been insulted? Meanings shift.
BTW, I own a copy of the White Trash Cookbook (or something like that) and there is a restaurant near my neighborhood called the White Trash Cafe. I don’t think I’ve even thought about being offended by either, though I usually object with the label is used.
Would “Trailer Trash” offend you less? It bothers me just as much.
On the other hand, this does tend to fall into the category of a group being generally allowed to use an insulting term self-referentially as either self-deprecating or as removing the sting of an insult by claiming it as their own. (The late Mr. Mickler (who, sadly, has passed on with cardio-vascular problems) was very much a member of the culture whose recipes he collected for these books. I’m not sure that his usage gives let to others to continue to use the phrase insultingly any more than Snoop Doggy’s use of “niggah” would give me let to use that term.)
Hell, Zoe, I’m old enough to remember when it WAS spoken in polite company, except it meant something different. Though I may have been told your age I’m far too much a gentleman to remember it or suggest you are old enough to remember when “queer” meant “odd.”
Yeah, and he’s using the original, and therefore, only correct one, by Contrapuntal’s rules. Except ya’ll been down there so long that the original usage was used against your family so…jeeze, not offending people is so hard when you have a historical perspective! Then there’s other terms. Me, a large numbers of my ancestors came from Germany but if somebody calls me a “kraut” I start thinking of smoked hocks cooked in sauerkraut with a little apple, dill, and caraway and I get totally distracted from being offended. Damn, I wish the weather would cool off so I could do some cooking! Um…where was I?
It bothers me much more. There the class component is much stronger and current. And since you can buy really nice manufactured housing really cheap I can see myself getting me some of that when my boss finally decides to move the company out to a rural area. If I’m going to be trashy I want to earn it, along with all the uncouth lifestyle bennies, like meth addiction and promicuity. I don’t want trashiness bestowed on me just because the Bohunk in me (who also likes a little kraut now and then, maybe with some sausage) can smell a bargain a mile away.
Tom, that the guy died of cardio-vascular problems is no surprise. I’ve eaten Down South as well as Up Nort’. Neither is the key to a long and healthy life. :eek:
And Lute, I’d like an example of an American (besides you) to have ever used “staved.”
The only pejorative used on the board that I find even marginally offensive for myself is “fundie”. A lot of people think I’m white, so I don’t receive many racial epithets. And I think the whole “hate speech” thing is stupid precisely for the reason that there’s so much debate in this thread. If you’re looking for an empty phrase, then “hate speech” qualifies. It’s always going to be whatever Lynn thinks is offensive — or whichever mod or admin enforces it. That says nothing about the speech, but only about what they think.
Got it. You’re touchy if people say you are. And if you disagree, that just proves it. That’s a pretty good Catch, that 22.
Now you’re just frothing at the moputh. I insist that one word in one context has a specific meaning, and you state that I claim it to be true of all words. Whegro please.
This is where we really disagree. I assert that the phrase is only used to describe white people; you seem to be saying that it is applied equally across the spectrum. Respectfully (and I do mean that, whatever you may think) I find that idea to be ridiculous. If you could convince me that the phrase is used indiscriminately with regard to race, I would withdraw my objection.
The original Wikipedia article on “steam shovel” did not distinguish between power sources. Four months later, someone finally edited the article to indicate that “steam shovels” are now usually powered by diesel engines and it took an additional edit to even note that steam shovels are actually powered by steam. Here is a current children’s picture in which a monkey or loader-with-backhoe is presented as a steam shovel. Here is some guy’s journal, dated 2001, in which he repeatedly refers to a steamshovel, despite the point that the likelihood of him actually watching a steamshovel at work in a U.S. city in 2001 is nil.
[/QUOTE]
I did not mean to include tom’s Wikepedia cite in my post. I also meant to respond thusly to his last comments–
I don’t have enought to share. it wouldn’t be hubris if there were enough to go around.
Frivolity aside, if you are suggesting that hate speech is defined by what people mean rather than what they say, then I suggest that the hate speech rule is either toothless, or capriciously applied. We do have a list of banned words that by definition have only one meaning; the “hate speech” one.
Now claiming to know what someone means when he says something, there’s your hubris right there, Bucky.
This seems to indicate that you have been missing my point all along. Of course the phrase “white trash” is only used of white people. That has never been in dispute. What has been in dispute is the meaning that the speakers of that phrase give to it. (And, it would appear that you have still not bothered to look at how people have used the phrase.)
When “white trash” first entered the language, it clearly indicated a white person whose class, wealth, and manners made them the object of derision and the adjective white clearly indicated that they were “saved” from utter depravity or utter scorn solely by the virtue of their skin color.
An image of the people who were so identified was created in the minds of a large number of people who lived in that time and place and the phrase entered the vocabulary of the people as an identifier for a particular group.
After the Southern Disapora of the middle 20th century, the speakers of that phrase were scattered across the North and West in places where many of the speakers never encounterd anyone who was not white. Similarly, with the repeal of Jim Crow, some number of Southerners were removed from a constant, daily reminder of class divisions based on race. At that point, the phrase remained in use because it was the phrase that people had heard in their youth and passed to their children, but the phrase was a phonetic construction in itself that no longer carried a meaning whereby white distinguished a person from any other group. (In many cases, the speaker would not have even known anyone of another color or, possibly, known where to find a person of another color.)
Thus, a large number of people who use the phrase “white trash” do not even realize that they are including “white” as a descriptor. It is more of a phonetic element of a single term that indicates one group of people, just as “steam shovel” does not indicate a steam-powered device to many people and just as “dam’yankee” does not indicate that the speaker truly believes that the object is genuinely destined for hell.
I doubt that I am going to persuade you if I have not yet, so I will not trouble you again on the point if you choose to continue to insist that “white trash” must be racist in all its uses.
I’m sorry, Tom, but it has been in dispute. My mother and her gaggle of friends do, in fact, call ‘the people down by the river’ white trash, despite them being mostly hispanic or black. In fact, she’s used the term to refer to at least one black person directly.
No. But it does serve as a metaphor for what the only rule really is: Don’t piss us off. Anything else is merely descriptive of what that might be. But in some cases, like so-called hate speech, even the description is not helpful.
Liberal, all I will add is that I haven’t used your particular “F word” since you said that it offends you several months ago. Like many others, I don’t mind adjusting my language. Grew up doing it. Didn’t we all?
dropzone, I am so old that I forgot to remember that queer once had another meaning! (I will be 62 on Thursday.)
To be clear, I am not arguing that anything must be anything all the time. This is the second time you have attributed to me an absolute position that I have not taken. White trash is not neccesarily racist, anymore than “nigger, kike, and raghead” are necessarily racist in all their uses.
I find the term “white trash” about as racist a term that one can imagine.
It clearly is applicable to a segment of the white race.
It suggests that there must be a failure of character indeed when a white person who has the god- given luck to have been born white has sunk so low that he has become garbage in the general eye of society. Indians in poverty stricken reservations, and blacks in decrepit inner city environs we can accept because of course it is the fault of whites, so they have an excuse.
We don’t have a racist term for non- white people that implies they are garbage do we?
It seems to me that all societies need some group to be the punching bag. We’ve been educated for years against racism, and somehow because this group of undereducated poverty stricken people happen to be of the “superior” race, the modern rules regarding hate speech don’t apply.
Of course most whites aren’t offended by the term. It doesn’t apply to them. But it does allows them to feel superior to fellow human beings without the guilt of racism.
When a poster who has an issue with a white neighbour and labels them as “white trash”, he is relying on a prejudiced generalized view of a minority to convey his utermost disgust. He is also attributing his negative experience to the group as a whole as well. This can only lead to ignorance.
I disagree, and have given a working definition for it earlier in the thread that is more helpful than the definition for “jerk.” I have no problem with distinguishing between kosher and non-kosher speech; I suspect very few people do, even the ones trying to blur the lines.
That is the original meaning, yes, but the phrase has evolved.
We don’t need one. As E-Sabbath stated, “white trash” sometimes gets applied to those who are not white. I submit that “trash” has been linked to “white” for so long that dropping it or chaning it to anything other than “trailer” would be as successful as computer geeks pushing “cracker” to be used for illegal computer activites instead of “hacker”.
Cripes, the knots you people tie yourselves into trying to rationalize away your contradictions.
I’ll believe that “white trash” doesn’t mean “white” when someone responds to hearing “A black bastard cut me off on the freeway” by asking “what color was he?”
Perhaps. tomndebb has certainly argued the point compellingly, and yet…We live in a society where a man can lose his job for using the word “niggardly.” Where Huckleberry Finn is removed from school libraries. Where a reader can write to the **Atlantic Magazine’s ** Word *Court * and ask whether “crowbar” is racist. Where I can be accused of racism for serving a desert called “apple brown betty.” Where if you attach the modifier “black” to a word you had better be damn sure you are being complimentary. “White trash” may have lost the specific meaning it once had, but to assert that in today’s America it has absolutely no racial connotations is to be disingenuous in the extreme.
And sometimes someone wins the lottery. If you are relying on such an anecdotal outlier to buttress your position I fear you will not be able to hold it for long.
Consider these two sentences–
“Look at that piece of white trash walking in the door.”
“Look at that piece of trash walking in the door.”
Is meaning really beggared by the second example? Will your listener have no idea what you mean if you drop “white?” Is your vocabulary so paltry as to render “white trash” a neccessary element of it?
Try calling one of our Asian members a piece of yellow trash and see how far you get.
Though I may have been told your age I’m far too much a gentleman to remember it or suggest you are old enough to remember when “queer” meant “odd.”
