It is absolutely clear from this thread and from any cursory google search that “chinaman” is an ethnic descriptor.
The custom of using “man” (merchantman, man of war, etc. ) to refer to ships is totally unrelated and I would be interested in learning about the origin but that is another thread alltogether.
Can you find any citation of Kipling using it as a slur? I think you got it backwards here and right in your earlier post in that at a time when blacks and Asians were considered inferior the words used to refer to them took the same connotations. It was not the word but what it referred to which was considered bad. Any other word would have taken the same connotation. We see that today with the euphemism treadmill where words come and go because they soon become tainted with the same association as the word that preceded them.
The word Chinaman was used by Kipling as an objective, neutral, noun but his concept of Chinese people was negative.
Much like people on this board can say “Muslims support terrorism” and that does not make “Muslim” an insult nor is it intended to be. Someone can say “Mexicans are lazy” and the word Mexican is not intended as an insult or slur.
I do not think Kipling used the word as a slur but rather as an objective identifier.
Objective term or not, Kipling never had anything good to say about the Chinaman:
Letters of Travel (Chap 14)
From Sea to Sea (Chap 10)
From Sea to Sea (Chap 24)
Also, Dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
Are you thinking it’s directed at Afrikaners by black South Africans? I was given to understand it was an expression used by white Anglophones (for whom there are one or two unlovely Afrikaans expression in their turn).
But what I’m saying is that, The TV series Kung Fu propagated the usage. It exposed the derogatory usage to more people than Kipling ever did in a tangible way, within moving pictures of a Cowboy script.
Also, in your Kipling examples, just because he uses Chinaman as a noun or description of nationality within his derogatory fictional ramblings does not make the descriptor a bad word.
I can just as easily substitute Englishman, Frenchman, or Dutchman for Chinaman in any of those excerpts above and it does nothing to make perjorative the actual descriptor of nationality, because I could easily use the same descriptor to speak glowingly and in noble terms about the nationality
You could, but here’s the thing: People didn’t. The term “Chinaman” was used almost exclusively to speak in condescending terms.
Ed
The point is that the word itself was not used as an insult or slur.
Some people have nothing good to say about Muslims or Mexicans but that does not mean the words are insulting or slur.
Ed
Um, they damn well do have a right to protest if the word “gay” is used as a pejorative term specifically because of its association with homosexuality. That isn’t just “appropriating a word for one’s own slang”, that’s being directly insulting and offensive to homosexuals. So “the origins of ‘gay’ as a pejorative”, far from being the trivial non-issue you’re apparently suggesting, are in fact crucial to this subject.
As an illustration, consider the following parallel case: You’re doubtless aware that the name “Malacandra” refers to a fictional extraterrestrial utopian society in a 1938 novel by C. S. Lewis. If I object to what I see as the rather schmaltzy Christian-allegory piousness of Lewis’s depiction, I might coin the term “Malacandra thinking” to pejoratively describe mushy-headed sanctimony in general. Since the origins of that pejorative term would have nothing to do with you, even though it appropriates the name you’ve also chosen to appropriate for a different purpose, you’d have no right to protest.
On the other hand, if a lot of people happen to be prejudiced against you in particular, and I use “Malacandra thinking” as a pejorative term for stupidity or obtuseness specifically because it evokes dislike and contempt for you, then I’m insulting you, not just appropriating for my own slang a name you happen to use in another context. You’d have every right to be pissed off about that.
Arguable, but I don’t think I have the right to be peeved at anyone except the person whose kimstupidity* led him or her to coin the usage in the first place. If other people decide that the resonance of “Malacandra thinking” perfectly encompasses the kind of addlepatedness that they’re trying to convey, despite having not the least personal beef with me, then it fits me to resign. The word was not mine to appropriate; it had another meaning before I ever chose to self-designate by such an odd term and there are plenty more that I can choose to replace it for my own use. Most people who subsequently use the phrase “Malacandra thinking” will have no idea it ever meant me.
RE Kipling s would have to find relevant passages… I’m thinking of some in Kim but especially of a short story of an opium den run by a chimaman. maybe in Plain Tales of the Raj?
I personally do not think Kipling was a racist or used the term to that end. I think he was using a common term in the narrator voice of a ‘superior’ English man in india. Most English of that era thought themselves superior to ‘the native’ and some of Kipling’s writing captures that. Kipling himself spoke fluent Urdu (?), grew up in India, had a horrid time at boarding school in England, was a reporter based in poor areas of india, etc. He’s possibly my favorite author.
Disagree. The group that continues to get the most grief and never peeps about it is the group of people called men. You won’t find anyone saying “The Irish are so stupid!” “I have to train my Irishman to do what I want him to do.” You won’t find lists circulating on the web of ways a cucumber is better than an Irishman, and if you do, you’ll be hearing about it from someone, you can be sure. Not an ethnic group, per se, but a belittled, derogated, and disrespected group for sure.
disagggree it stupid peepol whut get most greef you joke abut stopidd pepol nobody say shit
Huh. I’d never heard that before. The phrase “He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance” is far more common in the U.S., but it also seems to be dying out, from what I’ve observed. There may be something to the Seventies TV show Kung-Fu having given the word “Chinaman” heightened pop-culture prominence, although clearly in a way that showed it to be insulting, but it had been used plenty of times before that, and almost invariably in a dismissive, insulting/arrogant “Yellow Horde” manner, it seems to me.
Let us not forget the story about hangin’ judge Roy Bean and the Chinaman. An Irishman killed a Chinaman because he charged too much for his laundry or something serious like that and was brought before judge Roy Bean who set him free because he couldn’t find any law in the books about killing a Chinaman.
The Wikipedia article is worth reading:
Chinaman - Wikipedia
That’s a point, but I don’t think it really applies at this stage of the adoption of “gay” as a generic pejorative term. Many of the people who use it pejoratively, AFAICT, are still very well aware that its meaning is based on derogation of homosexuals, and they don’t mind that in the least.
If “gay” as a generic pejorative does reach a point of being so dissociated from gays as a group that most people who use it have no idea of the connection, then I agree with you that those people shouldn’t be chided for it—any more than those who speak about, say, welshing on a debt or vandalizing a building, completely oblivious that those terms were originally derogatory of actual people called Welshmen or Vandals.
However, we’re not at that point yet with “gay”, and I for one think we should resist getting to that point. (Moreover, if we do get to that point it’s possible to retreat from it on grounds of principle, as we did with the now-unacceptable verb phrase “to jew down”, meaning to haggle with or out-bargain.)
While I deplore sexist “humor” directed against men, I have to point out that men are hardly unique in this grievance. (Nor do they seem as unwilling to “peep” about it as you suggest.) In fact, it’s only very recently that sexist remarks about men began to be considered more socially acceptable than sexist remarks about women. And you can still find gazillions of examples of anti-woman disparagement on the web, such as lists of ways that coffee is better than a woman, ways that a beer is better than a woman, ways that a video game is better than a woman, et cetera, ad nauseam.
For what it’s worth, I was using “gay” as a pejorative (but no longer; it sounds gay) long, long before I ever knew what the concept of homosexuality was. Perhaps it’s true that those from who we’d heard it had an inkling, but in all honesty we had no idea. That qualifies under your reasoning, as one could easily educate (as I am now) the users of “welch” and “vandal” and “jew” and “gyp” about the true origin of the word. Heck, I know the origins of all of those, and the only one I don’t use is “jew.” The reason I don’t use “gay” is because it just sounds gay, in the autoreferential sense. I’d be embarrassed to use it not for offending sensibilities (really? offended? I’m still incredulous), but because it simply sounds juvenile. No relation at all to gay people these days.
I was going to say western white man, but IMO you are still pretty close.
What about referring to someone of Asian descent as “Oriental”? That seems to have gone out of vogue and become derogatory.