“Oriental” comes from the fact that Europeans used to orient their maps to the east and, in fact, viewed it as up.
Growing up, my friends and I used the term “beaner” frequently. I think to us it meant a person who might wear a beanie- someone with no sense of style… a “nerd”. I and remember a my little group calling Wayne Gretzky “The Beaner”, since to us he was the ultimate nerd who had made good in life. Needless to say, I was aghast when I learned (at age 32) that this is in fact a derogatory term for a latino person. :smack:
Growing up, I used to hear the phrase ‘play the white man’ used - usually said to a friend to try to defuse an argument and get the person to be magnanimous and let it go.
Not true. It comes from the Latin orientem, which describes the direction of the rising sun. The word ‘orient’ as a general directional term has the same origin, but is a much more recent development.
Actually renege itself is now suspect as well. An acceptable pronunciation is “re-NIG”, which makes people leery for the same reason as niggard*. So people generally pronounce it “re-NEG”, nowadays, if they are courageous enough to use it.
*The line from ROTK that, above all others, I knew would not be in the film: No niggard are you, Eomer, thus to give Gondor the fairest thing in your realm!
Isn’t it a situation where between members of the group, it’s OK to use a term that might be offensive if someone outside the group used it? After all, there’s the famous song “Okie From Muskogee”, by another Oklahoman. But if a New Yorker or Angeleno calls you that, isn’t it bad?
This is called the “insider/outsider” rule–It’s okay for a member of the group to use the word (usually in a kidding sense), but not okay for an outsider. The best use of this is “Queer Nation,” who have taken back the “queer” word.
Nobody here has mentioned the word “girl” being applied to a mature female, but I find that extremely offensive. As well as the “false generic” that says “men” includes everybody. Give me another word that excludes a group yet is used to include them, and I’ll back down. If a group of women is joined by one man, does that make them “men”? Or if a woman in a group sudden goes into labor and has a male baby, that makes it a group of “men?”
Here we go. The use of “men” instead of “people” I’ll give you. The slope you’re skirting (or is that term offensive too?) is the use of “he” as a gender-indeterminate third-person pronoun. I find it offensive to the English Language to say “She got a call from someone today, and they told her…”. “They” does not match “someone”.
I’m sure they at least sell Scotch tape.
Then rewrite the freaking sentence: She got a call from someone today and was told…" Sheesh. And the argument about his/her/their makes me wonder if the words “a” and “the” even exist.
It depends on the language. Hungarian, for instance, generally doesn’t use one of the articles (I forget if it’s the definite or indefinite). The English language identifies the gender-male and gender-indeterminate third-person pronouns. Period. The example I cited was the easiest I could construct off the top of my head, but there are others not nearly so amenable to reconstruction.
I don’t think so, nor do they sell the blue-and-white plain wrap. That market’s been taken over, somewhat, by the dollar stores.
I want to thank Shagnasty for his link on Spic and Span waaaay back in post number seven. That cleared up a lot, but I’m still wondering what Carl Sandburg meant when he wrote his children’s story about “Wing Tip the Spick,” a little girl from “The Village of Cream Puffs.” Was she like a nail or a spike? I’ll have to go back and see if he said she stood especially straight.
Rice burner. Meaning a japanese car.
This bothers me. Why do the japanese get to fuel their car on the rice they pick and I have to use fossil fuel that is jacked up in price by those table cloth wearing camel jockeys.
You’d think that Detroit would just turn Michigan into one big rice paddy to keep up with overseas production models.
Please don’t hurt me.
In Other News: My 1st Generation American German Speaking Husband never knew what Kraut stood for. He had no idea it was a slam against his parents homeland. Ja, good times.
Faggot
Everytime I say, " I smoked twelve faggots yesterday." I end up in the interrogation room down at the Precinct.
How did Faggot ( cigerettes) come to mean Gay/gay man?
Hungarian uses both the definite and indefinite articles: the Hungarian definite article is a (az before a vowel), and the indefinite article is egy.
a nyelv ‘the language’
az Istennö ‘the Goddess’
egy nyelv ‘a language’
egy istennö ‘a goddess’
Egy is pronounced almost like the English word edge and is the same as the word for the numeral 1. Az is the same as the demonstrative pronoun “that.”
Finnish, Hindi, Mongolian, Persian, Tatar, and Turkish are examples of languages that have neither gender nor articles. The third-person singular pronoun in each of these languages is the same word, regardless whether it refers to he, she, or it. In Hungarian the same pronoun, ö, is used for both ‘he’ and ‘she’, but the pronoun az is used for ‘it’.
Finnish hän
Hindi yih or vuh
Mongolian ter
Persian u
Tatar ul
Turkish o
Just as the English third-person plural pronoun they is the same regardless of gender. This is somewhat abnormal about English: other language with gendered pronouns keep the gender distinction in the plural forms. Not sure what the articles have to do with this gender discussion, though. Please pardon the hijack.
Um, most Asians do care. Are you ‘Oriental’? :rolleyes:
Oriental was a pejorative not too long ago. And it is also an easy way of not bothering to distinguish us. You know, “you all look alike to me.”
Is it so difficult to either try and figure out what country they’re actually from? Or barring that, call them Asians?
I’m Indian, and I don’t even really consider India part of Asia because the culture and people are so different. I’ll usually refer to myself as SE Asian. And China and Japan and Korea are all very different.
Call people what they want to be called, is all I ask.
[cough, cough]
Who am I writing this stuff for, anyway? 
Most of us [Japanese] don’t care, unless you have a chip up your ass.
Actually, “most” is a pretty broad overstatement. Many care, but a lot of folks of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean ancestry continue to use Oriental, themselves. (In fact, among my acquaintances, the only first and second generation Japanese, Chinese, or Korean folks who prefer “Asian” are on-line. Every person I know in real life uses Oriental to describe themselves and their families.)
Oriental has never been a pejorative (outside a few limited special contexts). This is one of the reasons that is causes so much confusion among those who are upbraided for using it. People understand why nigger is rude and generally recognize that colored is associated with Jim Crow laws and restrooms labeled “white” or “colored,” but few people have ever encountered a usage of “Oriental” that meant anything other than “from the East of Asia.” Claiming that “Oriental is a rug” does not explain the intense hatred that some people express toward the word. (In fact, one could make the argument that Oriental might be preferrable to Asian because it distinguishes Chinese from Syrians.)
I will use whatever term for which a person expresses a preference. However, it is not fair to insist that a randomly changed term (that continues to be used by a number of people that it identifies) is obviously wrong.