OK – so the word itself isn’t “eggplant”, but a version of the Italian word for eggplant. I think that’s disconnected enough that I can keep using “eggplant”. Which is the only word for it that most people around here are going to recognize.
ETA: I recognize “aubergine”, but most of my customers won’t.
My own impression growing up was that the word referred to a hippie-ish free-spirited wanderer. In the first Bourne movie, Franka Potente’s character is referred to by government agents as such without any racial animus, and she’s not, as far as I can tell, meant to be Romani (the actress is German; her Italian last name comes from a great-grandfather).
My first week of Japanese class in uni (1991), was when I learned from my professor that “Asian” was the preferred term, as she put it, because “the Orient” conjures up old exotic stereotypes. I’m fine with losing the word, as I doubt I ever used it outside of reading the names of Chinese restaurants. Fairly certain that most understand that now: in True Romance, Patricia Arquette’s character refers to Sonny Chiba as “the Oriental” and it seems part and parcel with Tarantino’s general use of racial slurs as class markers.
I’m certainly not going to tell the Gipsy Kings (mostly Catalans of gitano ancestry, who sing in Gitane and Spanish) that they should change their name.
Speaking of and eggplants,
When I was a kid, I was out in the yard with my brother one day and I called him a jerk-off. My grandma hustled right out there and told me to go in the house.
“Why, what’d I do?”
“You said jerk-off. Do you know what that means?”
“Yeah, it means he’s a big stupid jerk!”
“Don’t say that word! It means masturbation.”
“What’s masturbation?”
“…Go in the damn house!”
Told you that way was fraught with landmines, but what I wrote is that the terms Sinti or Roma are the wrong ones for a Spanish Gipsy, not that the Gipsy Kings are badly named or translated. Gitano (ES) → Gipsy (EN), correct translation. Gitano (ES) =/= Sinti und Roma (DE) not equivalent.
Oh, I understand that, but I’m sure I’ve seen someone somewhere complain about the name.
Used as an emoji 
means penis.
In Roald Dahl’s Matilda, one of the title character’s classmates is named “Bruce Bogtrotter.” I didn’t learn until well into adulthood that his last name is an anti-Irish slur.
I didn’t know some Inuit consider the term “Eskimo” offensive until a few years ago. (For reference I am in my late 40s in New England.)
Yeah, “gollywog” means nothing to me, and “pollywog” is the title of a Stranger Things episode in season 2 (which we coincidentally rewatched yesterday.)
I was under the impression (probably because it was a phrase copied down by the English professor in the old movie Ball of Fire) that jerk was from the phrase “just a jerk”, meaning a guy was a nobody with a bottom of the barrel job. Just a soda jerk, in other words.
Continuing the “pud” discussion, the term was a common euphemism for a teenage boy’s favorite body part during my youth in late-70s northeast Ohio. But only in the context of masturbation; you’d snicker that So-and-so was in the bathroom pulling his pud, for example, but it would sound odd to say you got your pud caught in your zipper, or tell someone to “suck my pud”. I think this is supported by a scene from The Right Stuff, when a bartender shoots down a pair of arrogant fighter pilots: “Round here, there are two kinds of pilots: the hot pilots who fly the hot planes, and the pudknockers who fly everything else. Now, what do you two pudknockers want to drink?”
For the other derivation, in one of his vet stories James Herriot mentioned his wife’s “Yorkshire pud”, explicitly referring to the food.
Yeah, “jerk-off” is slang for masturbation for obvious reasons. Calling someone a jerk has nothing to do with masturbation, that idea is so bizarre I am not sure if that was a whoosh or if that poster was actually being serious. 
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Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk was the first time I encountered “golliwog.” I still haven’t figured out quite what it meant back then or what it means now, but I don’t use the word.
I try to remember this,“You know what they say about opinions. Everybody has one, but you don’t have to be one.”
re: gypsy
Moderating:
I hope you are okay. But if you are, please refrain from posting incomprehensible stuff in serious threads.
So, with no real counter argument, your answer is to attack the poster, not the post.
If only there was a board maxim to address that sort of thing.
Maybe. I suspect the origin may be difficult to ascertain for sure. “Jerk” as US slang for dispensing drinks (beer or soda) dates to just after the Civil War, “soda-jerker” as an occupation from a few decades after that, and “soda jerk” from the 1920s.
On the other hand, “jerk-water” as a term for an insubstantial town on a small rail line (by extension an inconsequential and backwards town or thing—a “jerk town”; a “jerk senator”) is slightly older, dating from the 1850s. Maybe this comes from towns being so small that they didn’t have a water tower and water for the trains had to be “jerked” from a track pan, as Wiktionary suggests without attribution, although it could also just be from the quality of the track and the experience of riding on those lines.
In the masturbatory sense, i.e. “jerking off” and “jerk-off” as a term of disparagement, the word comes from the 30s, postdating the noun “jerk” as a derogatory term for a person, but only by a few years, so I guess it’s possible on the outside the two are linked. However:
What? I didn’t “attack” you in any way. I said the idea that calling someone “a jerk” has anything to do with masturbation and therefore leads to sexual violence against women is so bizarre I wasn’t sure if you were being serious or if it was a whoosh.
I guess from your replies you really do think that. OK then.