I’ve never been able to track down the source again, but I once found a pithy quote from a black activist, where he said the problem with white people using the word “n****r” was, “they never pronounce it right.” An elegantly subtle comment on the difference between words used within and without an in-group.
I said it in the other thread:
Shiksa is not a nice word. It can be contextually humorous, but so can many other not nice words.
Put it this way: if your bubbe insisted on calling your girlfriend a shiksa, it would be much much worse than if your auntie kept calling her a yankee.
I don’t know if it should be modded, though. I don’t like the concept of expansive forbidden word lists, and would prefer that the moderators retain the latitude to judge most words by contextual judgement rather than by referencing a spreadsheet.
They are definitely gendered nouns, like all the occupational nouns with “-ix” and “-ess” suffixes and similar: “aviatrix”, “actress”, “stewardess”, etc.
To the extent that the masculine form of a gendered noun stands in for people of both genders, while the feminine form is a specialized term for only female people, the use of such terms is arguably sexist. E.g., it’s sexist to say that the Jewish people as a whole are “Jews”, and an individual Jewish man is a “Jew”, but an individual Jewish woman should be called a “Jewess”.
Why is such usage frequently somewhat racist, or more generally reflective of some ethnic bigotry, as well as sexist? Well, because it tends to be applied more freely to people in groups that are considered more “alien” or “exotic”. For example, English speakers don’t traditionally distinguish gender among French people as “a French” versus “a Frenchess”: we speak of “a Frenchman” or “a Frenchwoman”.
@wolfpup, I appreciate your opinion, but respectfully disagree. Let’s use your rubber chicken example: is it probably tasteless? Sure, but it isn’t directly attacking anyone on their race, religion, or gender. Now, let’s say the same rubber chicken is hanging from a noose and someone had, as a not so random example, put a racially suggestive (or heck, politically suggestive!) name on the chicken in sharpie.
The issue with the word shiksa, is that even if the in-group use of it in public forum has weakened it, it’s still a demeaning insult and aggressive othering. It’s not something that’s been reclaimed, or something one would take pride in. The best we can say about it is that it’s a whole lot less offensive than other words mentioned upthread, such as the N word or K word, and in part because Jews have always been a minority whose in-language is largely unknown.
MY rule of thumb, which of course I’ve broken more than once is to see it this way: if the board was closed TOMORROW, and all that was left was going back via the wayback machine, is that one of the words / opinions that I’d like saved as a final mention?
Yeah, it’s a relatively mild insult, but it’s a dig both at the religion (or lack thereof) and gender of a person who is almost always being treated as Not Worthy. It’s an ugly opinion. And even when used affectionately (as the original clearly seems to be), it’s absolutely the exception not the rule.
It’s also helpful to remember some of the semantic reason for the word. Jewishness passes matrilineally. A Nice Jewish Boy™ who marries outside the tribe will not have Jewish children. “Shiksa” is wrapped up in not only the distaste of ‘the other,’ but in the fear that secularism will accomplish what millennia of murder and oppression haven’t.
Depending on who’s saying it, shiksa can to mean that awful woman who wants to destroy our family and religion.
So yeah, not a nice word.
It’s not wrong. “Race” is a concept that depends on context. It does not mean just “Black, white, and Asian,” it literally means a distinct population of people who share some commonality, be it physical, national, linguistic, or what have you. That’s in every decent dictionary you will ever find.
The idea that race is purely definable according to the broad categories of white people, Black people, Asian people, and maybe a few other categories is a viewpoint that is rather English/American in origin , and relatively recent, and it’s not how everyone everywhere thinks of it.
Pace ParallelLines, if the rubber chicken was hanged by the neck, especially in a noose, then I would concur with the employee that that’s not really a workplace-appropriate look, at least in the US. (However, your spelling of “humor” inclines me to think that it’s not a US office you were talking about?)
“No nooses or simulacra of any neck-hanged corpses in workplaces” is a reasonable rule—or “de facto prohibition”, if you prefer—of American business etiquette, given our society’s long (and not that distant) history of using lynching and the imagery of lynching for purposes of racial terrorism.
Hang your rubber chicken by the feet instead of the neck, if having a rubber chicken hanging in your cubicle really seems “humorous” enough to you to make this project worth pursuing. Then at least you’ll come across with more of a “gamekeeper” or “poulterer” vibe than a “lynching” one.
Mind you, I’m not trying to argue that a flat declaration of “I find this offensive” is a particularly good way to navigate these tricky shoals of workplace etiquette, either. I think a lot of the problems we have with microaggressions and complaints about people being “too PC” etc. in this society stem from the fact that a lot of people on both sides haven’t figured out how to clearly express the nuances of such issues.
Saying “You know, having that rubber chicken hanging by the neck instead of the feet comes across as kind of lynchy, is lynching humor really the joke you were aiming for here?” does much more to shed light on the actual cause of concern than saying “I think that hanging rubber chicken is offensive”.
Here is a related question (although if the mods want to move it to a separate thread, fine with me): goy and goyim, the Yiddish words for Gentile (the latter being the plural).
Are these offensive, should they be used cautiously or not at all here?
I personally have never heard them used with serious derogatory intent, although I can imagine that some strictly Orthodox and intolerant people (and I am not saying that all Orthodox folks are both) might do so. Although almost certainly in private, not in a public forum.
[I hit Reply accidentally, and rather than try to finish this post within the edit window, I’ll start a separate post to follow.]
My wife and I occasionally refer to the goyim ironically/mockingly, but only in private, possibly with other close Jewish friends, but never with real animus. And that’s the only way I’ve heard it used in person.
I can’t imagine people being offended by its use, but lots of things I couldn’t imagine have ended up happening.
I would say it has been somewhat reclaimed, and many non-Jewish women married to Jewish men do take pride in it. The same way some women take pride in calling themselves a bad bitch. At least for some people, this is the case. It’s clearly not universal, but there’s a large percentage of the Jewish and Gentile populations that don’t consider the word offensive, even knowing its origins.
I don’t think it’s based on ignorance, at least not entirely.
This. We’ve covered this before. It is not offensive in contemporary American usage. It is instead a matter of pride for some, and is a term of inclusion also. If you don’t want to use the word then don’t but don’t ascribe intentions of it’s usage out of context.
I see some pretty fundamental differences between these words.
“Gypped” is a word used by members of the dominant group to disparage others based on negative stereotypes of a minority group, stereotypes that are central to the historical mistreatment of the minority group. I’ve never heard any Romani person using “gypped” in a “reclaiming the word” fashion, and I’m not even sure what that would look like.
“Shiksa” is a word used by members of a minority group to disparage outsiders to the minority group, but in the last few decades (again, according to the Salon article I linked above) has taken on an ironic and sometimes self-mocking tone by members of the dominant group to describe themselves. It’s not even reclaiming the word in the usual sense, since the word doesn’t have any bite for the overwhelming majority of people it’d apply to. But maybe some folks (Drew Barrymore, for example?) have felt its sting and are engaging in reclaiming it.
It seems like something folks should be cautious about using; but it also seems a lot less yucky than “gypped.”
It’s become popular for anti-Semites to refer to some non Jews as ‘goys/goyim’ where the intent is to state that unlike a ‘goy’ they’re onto what the Jews are up to. I.E. there are three types of people in the world; the ‘Red Pilled’, the Jews, and the Goyim.
As far as I can tell this is a direct offshoot of anti-Semitic 9-11 conspiracies.
That seems to depend entirely on the particular group of people using it. See, for instance, this thread.
Shiksappeal. Ever see the episode where George and his father are selling computers out of the garage? The one with “Serenity now!”? Same episode. The B (or C) plot was a Jewish boy being very attracted to Elaine. Then the boy’s father. Then their Rabbi. (Over the course of the original run and a couple of decades of reruns I’m sure I’ve seen every episode several times )
Turns out there’s a trope for it.
Makes me think of a King of the Hill episode:
I will fully grant this, which is why I tried (probably poorly) to explain that it’s treated differently among different generations and flavors of the religion in my long prior post. It’s also probably very regional: as an adult, I haven’t ever lived in a high Jewish population area, in fact they were almost all static or shrinking, and the idea that with every member of the congregation that married out of the faith or moved, they were losing their future was probably a factor in their loaded use of the term.
How’s this for a compromise for all concerned though - if you personally could accurately use the term to refer to yourself, fine. It’s up to you if you want to own it. For pretty much anyone else using it in mixed company ‘in public’ to refer to someone else is somewhat insulting, and like other casual insults should be avoided unless that’s the intent.
And if you’re intending to insult someone, it’s a targeted insult based on both religion and gender, which makes it much more troublesome. Personally, if I want to insult a jerk of either gender, I want to draw attention to what facet of their jerkishness that’s set me off.
And for the subset of persons using the term without knowing the connotation or intending insult, we’re back to @Aspenglow’s and @puzzlegal’s original suggestion
I think that’s generally a neutral term. It certainly can be derogatory, depending on who’s using it and who they’re talking about, but it isn’t intrinsically derogatory.
Negress comes to English from French, which borrowed nègre from the Spanish negro probably in the 17th century if not earlier, and in French the feminine form is négresse. That’s not an unusual form in French (cf. duchesse, prophétesse, maitresse). Similarly, Jewess entered English from the Old French juise, feminine of jüif.
I agree. I think that’s a neutral term.