I apologize profusely for being so far beneath you.
Apology accepted.
I use “dick” and “prick” for guys. “Bitch” for women.
However, upon thinking about it more, I have never called a woman an “asshole”, a “jerk”, or a “bastard”…even though these are truly gender neutral descriptors. And I’ve never heard other people describe a woman with these terms.
I think bitch is to women as dick is to men. Both terms are insulting and are relatively gender-specific, but aren’t necessarily hateful. Bitches and dicks are assholes, to put it plainly. They’re mean. Make a bitch a man and she’d be a dick, and vice versa.
Cunt has no male equivalent. And by itself, it tells you nothing about the target of the insult except that she’s female or perhaps a man whose masculinity is being called into question.
Curious.
In the UK calling a woman a bitch is more of a description of her behaviour (vicious and self centred) than a generic insult. I believe its UK ghetto usage is different.
Calling someone an arsehole is about the same as calling someone a prick, basically it just means that they are stupid - or behaving stupidly.
Dick and prick mean exactly the same thing, although dick is slightly milder.
I suppose that a guy can be a prick and a woman can be a cow.
The one that we find amusing is ‘fanny’, which unequivocally means vagina to us.
Two nations divided by different insults …
My biggest question in the whole racism mess is at what non-nebulous point is it declared that we’re equal. And who gets to make that call?
I’d love to see a precise, explicit request list from any victimized group declaring what would be satisfactory with regards to feeling equality is achieved. None of this “you’ll know it when it happens” stuff.
I’ve been watching “Eyes on the Prize” on PBS. The documentary shows footage from the 50s and 60s of violent race riots, angry demonstrators holding up signs like “NIGGER GO HOME”, and National Guard troops having to guard the safety of small children because local politicians were wrapped in the Confederate flag.
It’s easy to let the grainy quality of the footage fool you into thinking this all happened ancient times. But it was just fifty years ago. Many of the people on the show are still alive. Our own secretary of state grew up in an apartheid state. If she ever has children, they would represent the first generation in her family to have been born with full citizenship. The first!
While things have progress far over the past half-century, I think it is too premature to talk about things being equal. Do you think the victims of apartheid magically become “equal” when the laws change? What about the enforcers of apartheid? I don’t know how long attitudes and feelings change, but I’d wager it takes longer than a generation or two.
I understand it takes a long time. But make no mistake, there are those within the victimized community who have a vested interest in keeping that community’s
status as victim.
I fear their interference to more than “resistant to change” racists.
Nigger ,surely is a corruption of negro though that seems to be un PC now ,its not the word itself thats offensive but the intent ; inspite of all the movies ive seen where african americans use it quite happily to each other. The British race relations board have designated the term "Paki"(short for Pakistani) as racist because it is apparently only used to offend !Which is nonsense! its just less of a mouthful!As a Brit (short for ?have a guess?) its ok to call me as such cos I wont be offended .The fact is if you have a raving racist who despises ANY race for no logical reason hes going to think in terms of absaloute contempt of the particular ethnic group what ever word he uses to describe them no matter how civilised .Worldwide I have been addressed as limey,pommy,honkey,rost bif and even whitey !but cant say i`ve ever been offended ,perhaps I should get out more.
As a 12th generation white American with AFAIK purely western European Christian ancestry, I don’t think I have any downtrodden heritage left in me at all.
Years ago I thought making some words taboo was silly and wanted to be able to use them in conversation and print, though without using them as insults or in an attempt to hurt. For example, to quote the Twain passages about the boys rafting down the river.
But the older I get the less independant I see our growing has been, and the more I see us all as just the next logical step in history, with surprisingly little new and different added within our own lifetimes.
It’s pretty imaginable that using the n-word would hurt somebody. I think it shouldn’t, but that’s a different issue than whether it does, and I don’t want to hurt anybody, at least not for something as minor as not substituting a euphamism.
There have been other groups with as much right, you might say, to take offense, as Blacks have about that word. But there aren’t any groups that large with that horrendous an experience that recent here in the US. The systematic way their ancestors were disadvantaged still has pretty loud echos today. So I can imagine ways they might feel about it and am opting out of making any of it worse.
Well, how dumb - I didn’t remember to answer the OP! Using the word specifically to discuss it isn’t racist, at least not necessarily. My point was that it’s potentially hurtful, but not that it was racist.
But white people DID experience hundreds of years of slavery but mostly earlier on in Roman Europe but Arab dhows from N Africa were still raiding Englands s/w coastline for English slaves for use in Tangier etc. right up until the 17th century,and we mustnt lose sight of the fact that slavery of the time were on about was and is an African custom.It isn`t a case of the evil Europeans and yanks swooping down on an African shore and rounding people up !This rarely happened because the local African chiefs got pissed about it as it was THEM who raided other tribes specifically to sell as slaves captured prisoners(or sometimes the greedier chiefs sold their own tribes people as slaves) and a bit of "help your self "on the whites part could result in a trade ban or even violence . Originally an indigenous African trade run by Africans FOR Africans until Arab traders appeared on the scene and started buying slaves themselves,and later of course WE appeared to do business but give us credit !we did eventually voluntarily give up the trade ,something that east and west Africa have never done the trade operating to this day.
At the risk of a hijack, this statement is in error.
Slavery was a pretty universal phenomenon in the world throughout history. That is true. (Europeans were still enslaving Europeans right up until the Renaissance, as well.)
However, the form of slavery that was most typical throughout the world–Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas–was not chattel slavery. As the result of existing wars, it was considered more humane to enslave captured enemies than to kill them. Among smaller populations, (tribal levels rather than national levels), slaves were taken as personal servants. The significant change in slavery in Africa was the introduction of chattel slavery, in which wars were launched for the purpose of capturing slaves to be sold as merchandise. That sort of slavery only began when European and Arab traders came to Africa offering to buy slaves, thus creating a new industry.
This is not a claim that “evil whites” imposed slavery on Africa–there was plenty of complicity to go around. However, the recent attempts by some revisionists to claim that the sort of brutal, people-destroying, chattel slavery that occurred in the cross-Sahara and cross-Atlantic trade was something that had always been present in Africa is a serious distortion of history.
The Arab and European traders did not simply take advantage of a new source of labor, they created the markets that would encourage more wars and more slave-taking. (And the sort of slavery practiced in Africa (and Europe and Asia) prior to the 15th century did not include such interesting innovations as “breaking” compounds where people were trained, using the harshest measures, to give up their own cultures so that they could be fitted into the foreign cultures to which they were sold.)