The convention is to refrain from using caps lock if you want to be taken seriously. There’s even an internet joke: I CAN’T YELL LOUDER THAN CAPS LOCK. That you have transcended the joke is not a good sign.
That said, I do agree that making a connection between monkeys and black people in the first place in cases such as this is racist.
I vote no.
I heard the monkey/bar/peanut/Q Ball joke over 30 years ago. I am pretty darn sure it didnt have a damn thing to do with “black people” then, nor did a whole slew of other monkey jokes. I seem to recall one about a pig, a cork, and a monkey as well…
One could also look at it this way. Monkeys probably put weird stuff in weird places (besides their behinds) all the time. If you think about it like that, the phrase implies that it will be put/found in a weird place and wasnt even put there for a good reason, which I find a little more amusing/clever and less crass than the up the rectum interpretation.
I knew a guy that got into trouble with his boss in a meeting because he referred to something that was too complicated as a “Rube Goldberg” device. The boss was sure it was a slam against Jews, even when he explained who Rube Goldberg was!
What a moroon!
I’m a volunteer fireman, and a buddy of mine on a neighboring department told me about being called a racist because he knows how to tie a noose.
It doesn’t matter that he’s the department training officer, is an expert in rope work and high-angle rescue, the fact that a noose is a damned useful knot for things besides hanging people, or that with a small variation in method it’s the most common knot used to tie a fishhook onto a leader.
He’s a racist because he knows how to tie a particular knot. :rolleyes:
I didn’t know the joke in the first place. There are a lot of internet conventions that I don’t know or care about. I do know that I read a lot of fiction and in fiction people use caps when characters are yelling at each other, and I think it’s a good technique for getting the emphasis across. Tom Wolfe, my favorite fiction writer, does it all the time. Harlan Ellison also writes that way when he writes things intended to be posted on the internet, addressing the public. If the intention is to “rant” to the audience of your writing, I think it’s a good technique.
If a post is written in ALL CAPS, I agree that it’s stupid. But sporadic use of capitalization to emphasize certain words only seems like an intuitive writing style to me. Again, I’m sorry if you don’t like it.
The guy in the OP seems a bit tight fisted to me. Refusing to pay a few pence for a chocolate bar, talk about niggardly. This opinion may seem harsh, but when I see a spade I call it a spade.
I prefer: “CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!!” for mocking those who abuse it.
Again there’s a difference between using caps and abusing them. A post written in ALL CAPS is not to be taken seriously, ever. But selective capitalization of words for emphasis? What’s so bad about it?
I’m from Ireland and I’ve never seen nor head that expression before today. On the whole racist sayings topic you still regularly hear people saying stuff like “the nigger in the woodpile” and “he worked them like blacks”.
Em…you don’t just capitalize in that post. You’ve got all caps, italics, all caps + red, and all caps + italics. All you need to do is throw in different font sizes and a “I burning your dog!” to hit the gone bonkers trifecta.
It would be a fairly common one.
Are you old enough to remember being told in school that we had to collect money to save “the black babies” in Africa?
I also remember when it wasn’t a tiger that you caught by the toe.
As to the two examples you gave, I can’t speak regarding the nigger in the woodpile (I don’t know what it means), but I recall hearing, after a certain senator last year praised her campaign team for “working like blacks”, that apparently we had a very limited number of mines down the country, and the people who worked in them would be called “the blacks” due to their dirt when they came out. So it may not have originally referred to black people.
Diversity, my friend. Every now and then it’s good to have a break from all plain text. But again, I’m sorry if you don’t like it.
Not an issue of liking or not. Trying to be helpful rather. I don’t see any reason to think that you want to have your posts ignored by people, so it seemed best to point out that people are generally going to skip over any posts which exhibit teh loony.