And Swiss is cheese 
The common one that comes to mind is “Scotch” and “Scottish.” At one time it was common to refer to people from Scotland as “Scotch,” but now it’s considered bad form.
Call us small brown men, or ‘little buddy’, or just ‘hey dude’. We’ve a lot on our minds to care.
Indeed. The afghani is the unit of currency used by Afghans in Afghanistan. I recall a US State Department official lecturing the media on this back when we started bombing Afghanistan.
Ditto.
And I’ve never viewed “Oriental” as pejorative.
Japan is “The Land of the Rising Sun” because it’s East of China, not everything else. In Japan the word for “China” is 中国 (chuugoku), literally meaning “Central Country”. Yes, this means that Europe is still "the Western World’ by this metric, but so are India and Afghanistan.
Fair enough, East Asian it is then.
Oriental as in from the East? So, like the UK? That’s pretty far east from where I sit. I think we should call them ultra-orientals because they’re from the far far east.
I guess I don’t care if you want to use oriental or not. I’m white so it’s not like I’ve got a vote here. It’s never been in my idiolect in the first place so leaving it out’s no struggle. I do judge white people who use it, though, if they’re doing it as a reaction to political correctness, because I think it’s a very petulant thing to bang on about.
I just realized that there’s a good illustration of this. Several old Chinese works in fact call India and the Middle East “The Western Regions”, including “The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions” (the “Western Regions” Include Afghanistan and India, among others). Perhaps the most famous example is “Journey to the West” (which is, in a way, a fictionalization of the journey that produced The Great Tang Records) which is a story about a monk going to India to retrieve Buddhist sutras.
The Land of the Rising Sun business is actually a Chinese construct. The Japanese just liked the idea of being that land that they adopted it. I have no idea what Nippon called itself beforehand. (I think that’s what Jragon may have been referring to by bolding China).
I don’t have much to add about the West business except Xian, means Western Peace, and was about as West as it got for those early Chinese. However, as far as derogatory terms go, the word Yang now is fully integrated into the names of many things like Yang Yu (the potato) has racist roots. Yang Yu means “foreign taro” but Yang originally meant barbarian, and has been used to describe anything non-China regardless of direction. Including people. I suspect that is now less PC than it was a few decades ago but it does help show that racism is often a two-way street.
I don’t recall the exact specifics, but I recall being taught that it’s not that Japan “liked” it so much as “Japan’s early writing and culture (especially for legal or upper class purposes) were so thoroughly influenced by China it was sort of inevitable they’d call themselves whatever China called them in an official capacity.” Basically, China was the major superpower of the region, Japanese writing and international politics were heavily influenced by China (and primarily with China), so on official documents it basically worked out to just label themselves with the most easily-understood and common-use moniker.
Really, “Far Eastern” is a better term for what lots of Americans mean by “Asian.” Placing Japan and the Philippines in “Asia” is a stretch–they’re in the islands east of Asia, hence arguably Archipelagic.
This is another example of redefining the common meaning of words according to an arbitrarily chosen metric—in this case that “Asian” applies only to the main body of the Asian continent. (You know, a continent is just a big island and an island is just a small continent.) That’s not even mentioning that by any scientific standard, Asia is only part of a continent. The continent is either Eurasia or Afro-Eurasia. Given that there’s no logic behind your definition of “Asia,” why not allow Japan and the Philippines to be includes, particularly because common understanding already includes them?
So this is not only a linguistics fail, it’s also a science fail.
Has anyone mentioned yet that “Asiatic” is another word that has gone the way that “Oriental” seems to be going? It would be odd for someone today to refer to a person as “that Asiatic gentleman.”
Odd, sure, but I don’t think it has any particular baggage attached. If I heard someone say it I’d probably look a little quizzical and think “hmm… quaint.”
Reminds me of a poster recently who decided that “mistress” was the perfect term to describe a woman he knows who has a non-married boyfriend living in a nearby town, as the boyfriend was paying her rent her something like that. Despite everyone telling him he was wrong, he kept insisting that it was the perfect word.
Yeah, the term he was looking for was “kept woman.” 
“Asiatic” definitely is a shade worse than “oriental”. Some of you whippersnappers just don’t get it. The Harvard Asiatic Review gets away with it because they have used the name since 1936. “Asiatic” fell out of favor long before PC correctness raised it’s head, eg 1950’s. Asiatic was commonly used to objectify in an unflattering way “The Asiatic as a rule are backstabbing yellow bellied cowards…” type crap. Kipling might be a good example of the use of Asiatic in a common and unflattering way.
large land mammals are asiatic, not people.
The last time I heard anyone use the term “Asiatic,” it was by the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam in reference to African-Americans. 
This thread is the first I’d heard of Asiatic.
They didn’t teach him to multi-quote in third grade. Why should he change now?