Don’t underestimate the sound of the word itself as a factor. It’s percussive, like lots of good pejoratives. “Hindi” or “Indi” don’t have that quality.
We agree (PL, MrDibble, and me) – “the words beginning with P” have a finely explosive quality – they sound good (or good for using with bad intent).
Supposing that Bangladesh had come into being as a nation, with that name, as at partition in 1947: I wonder whether our less-liberal compatriots would have come to dub their new neighbours as “Bangos” or “Bangles”, instead of the P-terms?
He’d have served in 1995 -1996 if straight out of school. *Might *have seen some shit around KZN. Or had a particularly traumatic Rugby World Cup 
OP shows that kind of nuance is way beyond the capability of your average racist abuser. If they can’t work out that the person they are shouting p*** at is not only not from Pakistan, but is in fact someone of Dutch descent from Southern Africa, explaining that most of the p***s they are abusing are actually from a region that used to called East Pakistan, but is now Bangladesh is a bit much to ask (and anyway stopped being the main country of origin for immigrants of South Asian origin to the UK decades ago, so if their family is originally from there they’ve probably been British for several generations)
This is strictly a peculiarity with you and possibly where you live. If the average person meet a South African living in the UK, chances are overwhelming (at least 90%) that they’re White, while the percentage of South Asians is roughly the same as in SA. That 90% figure was in 2001, and I don’t think it’s gotten any better - in fact, I’m sure it’s more than that now. It’s a lot harder for South Africans to get into the UK now than in the late 90s, so many immigrating now have ancestral UK visas - there’s not too many non-Whites who qualify for those…
Agreed. I know many South Africans from my time living in London. They are, without exception, white.
PTSD from combat would be either the intervention in Lesotho or peace keeping in central Africa if he was serving at those times. But it could also be from a training accident or similar. I’m friends with or have worked with lots of current or ex- SA military members and they have plenty of PTSD worthy stories from normal peacetime operations.
One of our Presidents used the term in a press conference… I think he just didn’t know that “Pakistani” is the normally accepted term. But we were bombing the hell out of the country at the time. Kind of a big “whoopsies,” or just repeating what he heard from his cohort.
Darn it. I replied before I read your response. I agree with you.
FWIW while most of the South Africans I know in England (in the Thames Valley region) are white, a significant minority are South Asian (or could be mistaken for that, as they have Malay and African hertiage), way more than the you would expect given the ethnic make of South Africa (and many more than Black South Africans I’ve met in the UK)
Also most of the people with Indian (vs Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan) descent I’ve met in the UK are actually from Africa. But mainly from East Africa, not South Africa.
“There are only two things I can’t stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch.” - Nigel Powers
When Jess (Parminder Nagra) was called a P*** in Bend It Like Beckham, I thought she was mad because she was Indian. :smack: I had never heard the word before.
ETA italics
Well, I would say they are the same in the sense of being extremely offensive slurs. Using either term, even in reference to a third party, would rightly see a person get completely ostracized from virtually any group.
However, the N-word is also associated with the terrible history of slavery in the US. So I would hesitate to say “all the same implications”.
Mr. Oosthuizen is without doubt a white South African of Dutch descent. He is most likely a so called “Afrikaner” but he may or may not use Afrikaans as his mother tongue. There are many whites and so called “colored” folk in the RSA who have become anglicized.
The four letter obscenity he used is a rather crude word for a vagina.
He could also be Coloured.
He didn’t use the obscenity, his British neighbour did - it was Paki, not poes.