Apparently, OED says otherwise; but I’ve always assumed ‘jerk’ referred to how some mentally or physically handicapped people move. So calling someone a jerk was like calling someone a ‘r____d’ or a ‘s__z’. (And ‘jerkwater’ and ‘soda jerk’ also reference the motions of ‘jerking’ water and ‘jerking’ a soda handle.)
This week I learned that “liver lips” is a slur against Blacks or maybe alcoholics. Also, this week I learned that the term “liver lips” existed.
I first heard the term ‘liver lips’ from a coworker in the '80s. He was referring to Mick Jagger. It never occurred to me that it was racial or related to alcoholism until this thread.
For context, see this thread.
I fixed the spelling of the title (i hope).
The wisdom is not that so much the term “Eskimo” is offensive— you can talk about the family of Eskimo languages, for instance— but that you should not lump together Inuit, Yupik, etc. as if they were all somehow interchangeable (or apply the word to peoples who are not or do not consider themselves Eskimos!) But I am not really close friends with eg any Native Alaskans so do not take my word for what they think.
Which is why Liver Lips McGrowl did not make an appearance when the Country Bear Jamboree reopened at Disney World. He was replaced by Romeo McGrowl, who has a different jacket and a different hairstyle.
If I write a post that’s as short as this with no links to Wikipedia entries, it doesn’t mean that I don’t know more about the subject. My natural inclination is to write long posts with numerous links, but sometimes I have to get somewhere immediately. I’ve written long posts about this on the SDMB since 2000. Anyway, people have written much of what I was going to write but didn’t have time to do.
Not me, but my mother learned at age 62 she should not be talking about her bluetick hound chasing the coons out of her yard so happily.
I found that to be a quite comprehensible comment on censorship. Maybe I’m wrong.
It took me a moment, but I got it, too.
Thanks, puzzlegal. And today I learned how to spell pejorative.
Oh, I thought of another one. Somewhere or other (maybe the comic strip Pearls Before Swine?), it was mentioned that one ought not to say “Long time no see.” I’ve used it for years. I thought it was in the neighborhood of “see you later alligator”, but apparently it has to do with Chinese pidgin, which was news to me. So I had better be cautious with these words, too.
Trapeze act for me.
Kind of looks like the Gettysburg Address at first, but I don’t see why ‘Four score’ and ‘years’ would be censored; and the word in the Address after ‘go’ isn’t ‘a’.
I wonder if any productions of Guys and Dolls have cut the reference to “Liver Lips Louie”?
See also: “chop chop” and “no can do.”
I don’t think that I’d ever heard or read the term until a couple of years ago; I saw it on Wikipedia, in the description of the actor Ronald Lacey, who played the villainous Nazi, Major Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and who is white:
Not that I’d intended to use the term anyway, but now that I know it’s a pejorative, I certainly wont.
I have a very hard time believing anyone is going to be offended by this. Except maybe people who read the comic and are now offended vicariously.
In the other thread, I said of course that term is an anti-Black slur, because that’s the only context in which I’ve ever heard it. Now I don’t know what to make of the phrase in light of this character name. I don’t remember the role, and apparently he only got one line in the show, “C’mon, guys, let’s get out of here.”
This guy played the role in a London production in 1951, per a 1980 article in the New York Times. (He is non-Black and I assume the role is/was not that of a Black character, though perhaps it is/was, who knows.)
At my high school, there was some fretting over whether to keep the line “Get up, you fat water buffalo” - because it’s spoken to Nicely-Nicely Johnson, who was being played by a Black student. (Also because the UPenn “water buffalo incident” was still a recent memory.)
I use that phrase too.
Which begs the question: is a phrase really offensive if its offensive origins are so far in the distant past as to have completely been forgotten?
If, say, I use the word “varlet” to describe something distasteful (“that movie’s lead actor was SUCH a varlet”), and the word originally mean something really, really awful… 300 years ago, is it still pejorative? Note: I know nothing of the origins of the word and while I know it’s an insult, I have no idea just how nasty it might have been in the Middle Ages.
“Varlet” comes from a word meaning servant or attendant.