1. The KKK has between 3000 and 6000 active members in the entire world (for context at the most that's still less that 2 hundredths of a percent of the total us population... it's literally 0.0017%) I'd suggest you actually come into the 21st century instead of pretending it's still the 1930s. The KKK are an irrelevancy in the modern world 2. Secondly, the outfits they wear are religious robes. They are not dressed like "ghosts". The hood is a Catholic garment called a capirote. They are worn to show penance and are still used in many Spanish speaking countries today. Fun fact, this is also where the Dunce Cap originates. Saying they're dressed like ghosts is an insult to the religious sects the garment represent. And the irony of all this is that the KKK dressed like this while actively persecuting Catholics
An issue I have with stuff like this is when the derogatory usage is super obscure and most people wouldn’t even know about it, you’re just calling attention to something that really doesn’t need to be uncovered. While it’s obviously good to be educated I don’t see a big use for knowing obscure outdated slurs you‘ll likely never encounter (and tbh you can usually tell by the context if a word is being used in an offensive way even if you’ve never heard the specific term). At best it brings to mind something negative whenever you hear a word you previously thought innocent and at worst gives bad actors more ammo. That said though if someone feels personally offended by a word, IMO it shouldn’t be a big deal to just not say it around them, even if you find their reasons a little dumb (given that it wouldn’t make communicating unreasonably hard). It’s not too different from a grandma not wanting to be called “meemaw” even though it’s not an offensive name and other people might like it. Though, in my experience usually people who get offended over obscure etymologies are looking for something to be mad about for whatever reason, or as you said the word isn’t actually the heart of the issue.
"IMO it shouldn’t be a big deal to just not say it around them, even if you find their reasons a little dumb" -- Exactly this. I personally think the "anything rope related is off limits" is a bit out of pocket but working it into every conversation once you know the person doesn't like it crosses a line and bleeds into bullying.
yeah words are only slurs if they are used as one me personally ill only bring something up if i am not comfortable with someone using that word because of the connotations but it should be a case by case thing imo
Agreed, especially regarding giving bad actors more ammo! I have an example to trot out on this topic: the "ok" hand symbol. A white-power organization started using it a few years ago as a dog whistle. When other people caught on, some said that no one was "allowed" to use it anymore, aka canceled. Since I heard that message from the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, my mind immediately went to the Star of David. It made me wonder what would happen if that same white-power group started using the Star of David as a symbol of their own. Obviously, that is a very unlikely scenario, but it seems like a lot of power to give to the bad actors.
I'm with Dr Jones (And there goes the Aqua song. Drat) on this. If it's not widely understood to be offensive, don't force your conceptions onto others. Personally I find that intensely arrogant. You're expecting the world to change because you are offended by the word "grass" or something equally innocent like "tea" or "book". If rope makes you think of hanging, that's an extremely worrying association that you should get help for, not something you should expect everyone to not use in your presence. The same goes in the other direction though. The antiquated miserly synonym? Probably shouldn't use that one. It's amazingly close to an intensely potent racial slur, and there's a perfectly serviceable alternative that's multiple orders of magnitude more commonly used. It honestly reminds me of a symbol still used by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism as well as the Akan, Hopi, Navajo, and Tlingit peoples. (Thanks Wikipedia for the list). A certain early-mid 20th century German political party decided to misappropriate that symbol and now there are entire religions and ethnic groups that get to explain to every under-educated white person that sees their culture "No, this has nothing to do with those jerks. It's millennia old. They stole it" Personally I wish people would work towards de-stigmatizing some taboos. By giving the opposite of a concept weight, you necessarily have to give weight to the other side. Can't have up without down, light without dark, anti-racism without racism. If you want to "defeat" a concept? Quit giving it any weight. No sexism isn't a state where you care about sex/gender, it's a state where those things cease to matter. Boosting women or people of color because they were harmed in the past is a wonderful first step but it should be transitory because by saying "I am going to give this class of people benefits" you are perpetuating the idea that those distinctions deserve different treatment.
Being misunderstood and thought of as intentionally trying to be offensive happens frequently in Spanish when trying to talk to other Spanish speakers in Latinamerica. My favorite example is "arrecho" which is slang for angry/upset in my country but to Colombians and Panamanians in the room I was proclaiming to be "horny" aloud because that's what the same word said the same way means to both cultures.
I'm a black man, and spooky should NOT be cancelled. The derogatory term "spook" was old and passe when I was a kid, and I'm 56 now. I haven't heard anyone use it in the derogatory form in ages.
For sounds from your mouth hole to hurt someone is ridiculous. Blah. Boom. Did that hurt? No because its just sounds from your word hole. If someone is offits their fault. I got call3d every name in the book. Literally didnt do anything. People need to toughen up. I also got chased home by seniors in 4th grade. Ild rather be called names. It doesnt hurt!
The only time I've ever heard it that way was in Back to the Future and it was already outdated then since it happened in the 50s Hell the only time it gets revived to be used that way is in South Park and The Boondocks because of the professional racist characters Like does anyone actually use coon as a slur outside of hardcore KKK members? Like South Park was able to call Cartman the Coon and it wasn't censored at all
Code monkey is a phrase commonly used to refer to programming interns and other low skill programmers. I once used it and it upset a person of color for the obvious reason (though I was not referring to them or anyone else in the room as such). It was as simple as apologizing, explaining that the meaning of the phrase has nothing to do with race, and assuring them I wouldn’t use the word around them since it was upsetting. ‘Tis easy to accommodate people’s emotional well being if one merely tries.
In Brasil, referring to black people as monkey is probably the worst offense you can direct at a black person. This caused some funny confusion when I was chatting with some vietnamese friends, since they used monkey to refer to themselves acting in a playful and dumb way.
@@r.rodrigues9929 Whereas I've met Chinese people who were called monkey (in Mandarin) as an effective and hurtful slur. In fact, downright distressing slur in at least one case.
Years ago I told a British person that I would, “be right back, just have to go potty real quick.” a somewhat cutsie way of saying that I was going to use the bathroom. He laughed and explained that to him I’d said I was just going to go off and go crazy, but that I’d be right back.
As an English person, this seems weird to me! Potty as a Euphemism for slight madness is not used that much any more. If you had said that to me, I'd have thought more that you were going to use a toddler's toilet & would have thought you very strange, laughed and mocked you! 🤣
Reminds me. Once I was using the urinal and heard a homeless guy talking to another homeless guy and say “I don’t fuck with no sp**ks, know what I’m saying?”. I was 19 and didn’t know what the word was so I looked it up and found the answer on Urban Dictionary. Later I mentioned it to my mother and she was like “I haven’t heard that term since the 70s”
Speaking of words having very different meanings in different contexts, Bart Simpson once demanded that Principal Skinner teach him a swear word he didn't already know. Skinner whispers in Bart's ear, and Bart responds in surprise, "That's a bad word?!" Skinner replies, "As a noun it is." My friends and I were trying to figure out whether there's really a word like that, and I eventually came up with one... (apologies in advance to anyone offended by this)... "Snatch"
@keouine They would qualify as bad words in Bart's estimation, I'm sure (esp with the thrill of making Skinner teach it to him). But if you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears!
I was singing along with a K-pop song that I was listening to through my headphones. This did not go over well with the person walking past me who was unfamiliar with the Korean words for “I” and “You”
On the subject of free speech and context, I've been triggered recently over the censorship of perfectly useful, everyday words; words like 'sex,' 'suicide and 'die.' Facebook is a particularly egregious offender, bleeping out those words, and others whenever they appear in audio and/or video posts. What's your take on this practice?
I get you so much. Basically, it started as a practice on certain social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, UA-cam, etc.) as a means of preventing the post from getting shadowbanned/age restricted/straight up deleted. (I also see it in fandom spaces used to prevent certain names of characters/media/etc. from showing up in searches, but that's a separate issue). On that level, I get it. but it's also incredibly problematic because: 1. It makes it hard to mute those words on platforms/extensions that allow muting words, because you have so many variations of censorship patterns to take into consideration. 2. Especially with euphemisms, it lessens the weight those words carry, almost making a joke out of getting around saying these serious issues out loud. 3. It further stigmatizes issues like suicide and sex, like those are "dirty words", so to speak.
I'm not speaking for anybody but myself here. I'm not the representative from the African American delegation lol, but being black and gay and someone who took linguistics, i have thoughts on reclaimed slurs and words with old offensive meanings. These are like Asimovs Laws of robotics for how fundamental they are. 1. Words mean what ppl use them to mean 2. Words =\= their etymologies. To use a less charged example I have seen people weaponize the idea that the word C00n is a racial slur. Of course it was a racial slur in the context that it was used by white people about black people at the turn of the 20th century. But it has a different meaning the way that's been used since the middle of the 20th century by black people exclusively about other black people. That's not really a racial slur and it requires a certain amount of cultural understanding to know that. The irony is that by sticking to the original meaning were attacking black ppl for calling out internalized racism, tokenism etc. That said be normal about it LMAO. Don't be a know it all. Don't try to debate someone into agreeing with you on the use of these words. Be kind. It's free lol. When I'm around older gay men i try to be considerate of the fact that the British word for a cigarette still has a lot of sting for some of them. If I know it bothers someone i don't use it even tho I have fully reclaimed that word for myself.
I worked on a project where the black linguists were unanimous that words like “coonhound” are innocuous and other people shouldn’t be offended on their behalf but should know when it’s not their turn to give a f*ck. And especially to your point, there’s idioms like what I assume you’re referencing - ABC - that aren’t for me to have an opinion on at all
As a certified representative of the Council of White Individuals (kidding god I do not want to be associated with half of them), it's that last bit that's really important. Know the context and don't try to use things like this as a way to say a slur and then call it okay on a technicality. Just be normal about your language. If someone is uncomfortable with a word, don't use it, it's not that difficult. And don't intentionally say controversial words just because "free speech". It should be common sense. My gay friend can call me the f slur because they've reclaimed it AND I'm not offended by it. I could use it with them despite being straight (mostly...) but I don't find a need to, and more importantly I'm not gonna use that like a pass to say it to random people.
I'm British and this reminds me of a different point, but the online world is international. I would never think twice about using the word fag (to mean cigarette) or spook (to mean spy). And it works both ways. Watching Avatar the Last Airbender was weird at first for me because 'bender' is a homophobic slur over here. I figured they didn't know that and got used to its new definition. Like, communication is about trying to understand what's in the other person's mind anyhow. Not override it with your own understanding of their words.
@@ValQuinn I would've never guessed that about bender, we also use it as a word for like a wild night of partying and drugs, or at least drugs. I think the drugs are the main part though. Actually I think they're sometimes or often more than a day. That's a perfect example then of the words you listed where especially the first one (I'm comfortable enough saying or typing it except this is the internet so I'd rather avoid it and figure people on a language channel would understand this instead of just saying it's weird). Where if they said that on a show as an American I would've been and some would be surprised and confused. Or now I know what it means but it still stands out to my ears, despite not thinking of it as remotely offensive given the context. More like "oh there was that word. I probably should avoid quoting this part if convenient..." But yes it's literally just communication, I just saw a short about a piece in the Museum of Modern Art that's a painting of just text forming a bibliography, looks very scholarly and normal like a page from a book but the sources are all related to linguistics and communicating and stuff. Art, like language, is just a way of expressing or communicating things from our brain, it's just that a lot of art is less direct or harder to interpret like someone's random conlang, maybe they have a few words you can guess from context and tone and a few similar sounding ones to English, but you'll never understand exactly the thoughts behind the art. Which is why we don't really use art to communicate for practical reasons. So language is art and art is language (or are they not because people use them to describe separate things? I'd say it's both depending on context, so it's pointless to be pedantic about disagreeing with someone saying "um, actually... technically they're the same" because they aren't being used the same. It's just interesting to point out and discuss or think about with curious people)
“I need to see a man about a horse” is what my Grandpa said when he wanted to go to the restroom. I heard it so often growing up that I say it as well and I’ve received some very strange looks because of it.
Thank you for that bit of linguistic history. Meanwhile in Germany, my mother and I just call the restrooms "whereto" when we're in public. E.g. it's intermission during a concert. One tells the other "I'm going whereto for a bit."
That's interesting because I'm Australian and my grandpa used to use that idiom almost exactly but it was seeing a man about a dog instead of a horse, he was from specifically an island off the coast of South Australia called Kangaroo Island, and spent most of his life on farms, if you don't mind me asking, where is your grandpa from? I find it interesting that the idiom is widespread enough that Taylor used almost the same idiom from the other side of the pacific, but it's still obscure enough that most people seem to have never heard of it, must be some kind of farmer connection
@@beesinpyjamas9617 I'm English. It's "see a man about a dog" here, too. Not as common as it used to be, but still used often enough that most people would get what you mean.
my favorite obscure phrase is "you want i should?". something i have no idea on the origins of but understand to be a very odd "translation" of "do you want me to?". while searching for this phrase's origins i've come across things stating "the american south" ,"american east coast mobsters", "a poorly translated german phrase".
I think its interesting that the way we call people stupid or crazy keeps evolving where we have medical terms that get used as insults that stop being medical terms and the new medical terms then become insults. Like, the point is to be insulting and offensive so until people decide to stop calling people stupid or crazy, that will keep happening
You would never call an actually crazy person crazy as an insult. Same with the r-word or a lot of other cancelled words. Like we want to hurt someone's feelings, we'll always be using whatever achieves that result lol.
We wouldn’t want to trigger anyone who might be primed to respond to any phrase which might be construed as a reminder that the afore mentioned ‘spade or bloody shovel’ had been the tool of a pair of your northern neighbours, Burke and Bloody Hare.
@@ianchristian7949 Aye. You’re right - It is not too soon to acknowledge that Burke and Hare earned the right to be numbered among the precociously innovative.
As a tweetaalige South African, I can't imagine how we'd manage without spookie And when you mentioned queens, it conjured the lyrics, "and the queens we use would not excite you" Now I have that earworm stuck in my head
I recently heard of people getting offended by cartoon character Yosemite Sam and his use of the phrase "wait a cotton pickin' minute" as it was OBVIOUSLY a reference to black slavery. I offered there were plenty of white sharecroppers who picked cotton as well, and that Yosemite Sam is a parody of an Old West character and not a Southern one, but I got shut down by "you know what they meant by it." I am not sure THEY did.
Back in '09 a feral cat birthed and raised a litter of five in the dumpster enclosure ay my workplace. I fed her, then her kittens, until they were old enough to go out on their own. One stayed around the property. Though I'd known him his whole life he was still very leery of me for about four months. I'm a cat servant, cats need names, so because he was so cautious and ready to flee from any threat real or imagined I called him Spooky. It didn't hurt that he was coal black, a perfect Hallowe'en cat. I never thought of the negative connotation (they as a native Chicagoan I was well aware that it could be used as a slur) nor did my coworkers. Everything was fine until '15 when a coworker gave him a forever home. When she took him into her vet someone there was highly offended. Now he's S. in public, Spooky at home; you can't change a cat's name after they answer ti it. Times change, that's for certain.
4:50 Very easy if it is a room full of French sailors! Using the word "corde" (rope in French) is considered bad luck on a boat (and on a theater stage). They would use a name that specifies the function of the rope or if it is a generic rope, with no predefined function, the word "bout". I think there might be an exception for the bell rope.
I honestly didn't know the offensive connotation of "spade" and knew it as a word for a shovel or that one card. I always thought it was strange that spade was so rarely used to mean shovel to where I imagined it must be a predominantly British usage. Knowing this, I won't avoid it like the plague but having that understanding I decidedly won't add "to call a spade a spade" to my idiolect. Great video as always! Edit: I hadn't personally much to do with them outside my own errands so the discussion on definitions below is very insightful and I will try to read all of them.
In the US, a shovel has a rounded, deeper blade for moving dirt (like the playing card), while a spade has a square blade with a flat edge, but most people here will call a spade a shovel, or a "square shovel." If someone asks me for a spade, I have to stop and try to remember which kind of "shovel" they mean. Almost no one uses the word spade around where I live.
I unfortunately knew it because of how spade tattoos are sometimes used among some non-black people (mostly white people) to signal that they are into black men.
No, we aren't going to stop using the word, "spooky." We're going to continue using all of these words as we always have and life will continue on as normal. There's only one type of person that gets offended by things like this, and it's the one that goes out of their way to find a reason to be. It's perfectly acceptable to offend people like that.
i've always said "goat rodeo" for a jumbled mess. my favorite weird idiom is calling something "mickey mouse" to mean it is poorly constructed. For example "this is the most mickey mouse piece of shit i've ever seen, who made this?" I will often say "we are reaching peak levels of mickey mouse with this hack" when a project is going off the rails
A good and measured take, thank you! Like you said, it comes down to context. I would resist attempts to force words that are commonly used innocuously out of the language - coming from the UK, the idea that we should stop saying spook or spade, which as far as I know have never been derogatory over here, for example On the other hand the word you mentioned meaning miserly is markedly archaic, so while I'm not going to freak out any time I hear it, it's not something I would say myself, and unless the speaker seemed kinda socially oblivious, I would suspect a dog whistle
Good point on the dogwhistle. There was recently a scandal in the UK - more than one actually - where hobby groups and fandoms circulated lists of words to ban. They all ended up having a ton of Yiddish on them, most of which is neutral and not derogatory. It had the same energy as “the Vietnamese manicurists MUST be saying bad things about ME, because I don’t understand them”
You being British makes me think of the fact that being rational and kind goes both ways. If you were one of the people who still uses a word for cigarettes that some might find offensive, and you casually said the word to me as an American while clearly talking about a cigarette and using the word in a natural way, I wouldn't feel hurt nor would I attack you for it. Of course if the word was sensitive to me despite your innocent intentions I could politely tell you and you could avoid using it around me. Should be simple but people love to be mean and weird so I just do my best.
@@concerninghobbits5536 I was in London one weekend with a friend, and I still smoked back then, who I asked to borrow a cigarette but using the first 3 letters of the other word. An American women overheard and proceeded to lecture me about how rude and disrespectful it was, which was really confusing to me until she actually said the full word as I had never even considered the association until then. I played dumb, you can buy these meatball things that are disgusting in most supermarkets which are also called the full word, and acted confused about why calling someone a meatball was offensive which made her furious and stormed off. She seemed like the type that would pick up the box in the supermarket and take it to customer service to demand they stop selling them.
@ this is so funny because I'm clearly hearing in my head a British voice calling someone a meatball for being dumb, it may just be my imagination but it feels like I've actually heard it as a lighthearted insult.
@@languagejones6784 For what it's worth, I heard the "issue" with Yiddish from the other direction, the idea that Yiddish is so intimately associated with a particular ethnicity that white brits using Yiddish would have similar problems to white brits using AAVE, i.e. that the use of those words is potentially appropriative and disrespectful to the culture from which it came, especially if someone is saying them over an alternative English word just because the Yiddish version sounds funnier. I'd note though that this is just how one person explained it to me so I can't vouch for if that was the main take on it or whatever, it very much could have been just dogwhistling and this guy got the wrong end of the stick.
So, a semi common idiom in my area is "loaded for bear". It generally means to be heavily loaded in a way that's overly prepared, like you are going hunting bears. Typically, when I use it around people who have never heard it, they either ask or just go on like I didn't say it. One day, though, a friend of mine who is gay told me I really shouldn't say things if I don't know what they mean. I clearly know what it means, buuuut, I also know what bear means to him. I explained the idiom, and we both laughed pretty hard as I tried to make him fully and explicitly tell me what he thought it meant to be loaded for his definition of bear. I never did get that explanation.
"is beating around the bush starting to sound worse than usual given the current context? pause" LMAO 😭😭😭 i'd like you to know i got rid of my bush because i don't like wonder working power
The comment ”Cop a feel” has evoked raucous laughter amongst my friends. At an evening party of mixed friends, a female colleague started sensually rubbing my arm up and down with evil glee. I looked at her and said aloud, “You know, when I put on this angora sweater earlier this evening, I wondered who was going to ‘cop a feel’. Never did I think it was going to be you (a female instead of male.). Just my luck!” Oh… and thanks for the spooky explanation. I wasn’t aware of the derogatory connotation until now.
The Chinese example, or the cases of names like David Lynch or the given name Aryan, go to show how absurd it would be to have to avoid using words that sound like offensive things just because it can prime some people to think of painful things. We can't ask people to have different names or a billion people to say um differently.
IIRC, Iran is cognate with Aryan because the Aryans were the people mention in the Vedas for coming from the north to India. These Aryans were Indo-Europeans and later scholars thought they were the ancestors of all Indo-Europeans while they were in fact the branch that headed south to modern day Iran and India and stuff. When the Nazis talked about Aryans, they meant all Europeans in contrast to the Semic Jews.
@@twipameyer1210Thank you but if I may, you are almost correct. the Aryan people (Iranians) or people of Iran, called themselves that before going to India, and it was Darius the great that referred to himself as of Aryan descent. Also the Nazis meant all Caucasians not just Europeans (excluding Slavs and Jews in Europe for whatever reason - Nazis were a very irrational bunch of very evil people)
@@paultapping9510oh trust me man, Adolf and Hitler (although usually not combined or spelled differently) are at times used as part of names of people especially in South America. It absolutely has not died down and people name their children Adolf and/or Hitler
My view on all this is that if I become aware that someone is likely to be hurt by something I say or do, then I want to stop doing that thing. It doesn't much matter whether I think they are right to feel offended; there's already more than enough hurt in the world. But by the same token, I think we should try not to take offence where none is intended.
"there's already more than enough hurt in the world" - I would argue that complaining about terms like "goatrope" simply because "ropes are involved" is *adding* to the hurt. You're taking away people's joy for using language creatively just because you found a super-tenuous possible path to imagined offense.
@@vacri54 But that, in my opinion, is where the difference between how you treat/respond-to an individual in a 1-on-1 situation vs a system or a broad application comes into play. If I personally choose to reduce my usage of a term or phrase because of how it affects another specific person; that's my own personal choice and it harms no one and adds no hurt to the world. And it's not like I'm "selling out" or anything either, I'll absolutely argue against the other person taking offense in the first place (maybe linguistically if I know enough about the specifics, but definitely at least on a philosophical level), but what I think a lot of people don't realize is that if I backup my argument with good faith actions that prioritize that other person and their feelings; it strengthens my case, not weakens it (so many people go with the "argue about why they shouldn't get offended and then immediately go out of their way to try and offend them as much as possible", which seems to me to imply that they care more about their own smugness than actually being against taking offense). It is, however, an entirely different thing when it's not an issue of human-to-human interaction. If an authority, organization, or mob-like collective tries to make a sweeping rule against words or phrases in ways that completely ignore context and demonize 'offenders' with no nuance, when there are actually real attempts to take away people's ability to use language creatively for nothing more than exercising control or scoring 'points' for themselves? That's something that I'll pretty much always openly stand against. Basically, "resist authority, but meet people half-way" seems to be a decent rule of thumb in my experience.
@@ICLHStudio This comment sounds nice and all, but really it has no relevance because no one is trying to force you to say goat rope. So the fact that you have some internal dialogue and decide not to is of no consequence unless you are making a normative claim, but you say you are not. Yet you seem to be claiming some superior empathy to those who don't honor absurd requests that limit our means of using our language freely. Like, cool story, don't say the word, but this entire conversation is exclusively about what we SHOULD do, not what you privately decide to do. If you want to make a normative claim that we should avoid using words that might cause offense even if the offense is unwarranted, because that makes things go smoothly, then make that case. But you seem reluctant to say that because you're worried about offending anyone. You're gonna have to have a conflict some day my guy.
@@saintsalieri ...Okay, I'm honestly trying to understand how you managed to get... almost literally _any_ of that from my comment (did you reply to the wrong comment perhaps? Because very little of what you seem to be saying actually appeared in this chain as far as I can see). The original comment seemed to be saying something along the lines of: "I don't want to do something that would hurt someone, even if I think they shouldn't be hurt by it in the first place." The response seemed to be countering with something along the lines of: "By pushing responsibility and guilt for their own hurt onto others, that person is already causing more hurt to the world around them." And then my reply was aiming for something along the lines of: "But whether or not the offended person is causing hurt is irrelevant to whether we should try to avoid hurting them back; and also that by specifically treating them in good faith, we have a much stronger chance to actually change their mind and reduce the hurt they would be causing with that restrictive stance on language." So, yeah, not only was my comment quite reasonably relevant to the conversation; but you seem to be making a lot of assumptions and claims about things that "I said" or that the "conversation is about" which are very definitely _not_ the case here.
Love this channel. Makes my masters degree in linguistics feel useful. And since I’m listening to an entertaining guy with a PhD, no need to finish my thesis anymore, I quit :D
I often find that people policing other people’s language have a total lack of self-awareness. I once had a monolingual British guy tell me that I should not use my ownname because it sounds like an ethnic slur in English. That was only the case because HE consistently mispronounced it. I mean, how culturally insensitive can you be while pretending that you are sensitive about people’s feelings!
Oh my God. That’s absolutely hilarious. I for one have absolutely no idea how to pronounce your name. Let alone how to miss pronounce it. And who I might offend in the process.
Check out a Japanese UA-camr who makes funny vids about Japanese speaking English. Seems he can make just about any phrase offensive. The power of knowing multiple languages.
So, for context, I’m a disabled person (even that word seems to be offensive to some people .. but that’s a whole other discussion about identity vs person, claiming identity, etc etc) and I use a wheelchair. Words that I really have a problem with are ‘retard’/‘retarded’ and ‘spastic’. The argument I hear most often is that they have a legitimate use in medical context. ‘Spastic’ absolutely does - but only to certain disabilities - so using that *in the appropriate medical context* is fine .. but ‘retard’ is not used in that area any more. So yes, that one hurts because it is only ever used in the modern context to insult. And many people with disabilities have had that levelled against them to degrade and isolate them, which also informs what people think of that person’s mental capacity, even when their disability isn’t in any way related to intellect. (Ask me how many times someone on the phone has said ‘you don’t sound like you have a disability’.) There was an incident in Australia a few years ago where a shirt with the word ‘retardé’ was printed on a shirt and sold in a retail store. It means ‘to laze around’ in French, but but disability activists protested, and wider society responded by buying all the shirts and confronting the protesters. If I’m honest, I’m not sure which side of that I support, because my language nerd side battles with the side of me that understands why that was triggering. Side note about ‘spastic’: I know it can be used in America by some people to denote ‘super busy’ and feeling chaotic. I would still argue that there are better words and that we can learn to have good intentions in our speech. As a wheelchair user, I don’t get offended when someone tells me to ‘take a seat’ because it’s such common parlance. Different things offend different people, so responding with empathy when someone tells you they have an issue, and treating people as individuals, is a good way forward, in my opinion.
One time I mentioned the little fairies called "brownies", and a Black coworker got offended. I have *still* never heard that word in a context where it refers to Black people, but I guess it's a thing...?
I had a similar moment where I was telling my (white) dad about all the fairies I was studying and mentioned 'brownies' and 'knockers'. He had choice words about both...
What do they call the little squares of chocolatey goodness? And please don’t tell them about the British version of the Girl Scouts. Lots of the girls and women in my life were Brownies when they were young.
@MrOtistetrax if you're being serious, then you're a fool. Context matters. The wee folk in question were doing household chores for the main character of the story I was referencing, so my coworker's issue was that it sounded like I was talking about slaves or servants with brown skin. She had simply never heard of the wee folk at all.
@@roiljelly6255 The key there is what happened next. When you explained the confusion, did they stop acting offended? Because how one uses a word is just as important. You were referring to an old concept in folklore and mythology, if they insist on making it into a racial slur, personally I think that says more that they're looking to be offended than that you're actually saying something offensive.
Apparently, the Laurel and Hardy film "Sons of the Desert" was supposed to be named "Boobs in the woods". Since around that time the meaning of the word "boob" was changing, they went with the former name.
Idioms also vary from language to language, of course. The French for ‘to call a spade a spade‘ is ‘appeler un chat un chat’ - ‘to call a cat a cat’. Because my cat’s been neutered I have spent far too long trying to crowbar the phrase ‘to call a spayed a spayed’ into conversation. 10:12
This reminds me of the scene from "Back to the Future" (made in 1985, but set mostly in 1955) when a minion of the main villain said to a black musician on a smoke break: "This don't concern you, spook!" To which the musician replied while his fellow musicians got out of their car: "Who are you calling spook, peckerwood!?" I only found out MUCH later that both spook and peckerwood were racial slurs. Anyway, I don't think most people nowadays associate the word "spooky" with anything racial anymore, even if they might sometimes remember "spook" being used that way.
I think "spook" and "spade" would only be recognized as derogatory terms by well-read or older people. Those are both quite dated and have afaik fallen out of the vernacular.
@@SO-ym3zsI think spade would also be recognised by people (of any age) into race play. I remember from Kat Blaque's video that the flag/symbol for it includes the playing card spade symbol.
Rather than taboo words, I'm more concerned with words that mean different things to different people. Arguably, the meaning of "decimate" is shifting in actual use, but using it to mean "obliterate" will mis-communicate to those who understand it as "reduce by 10%". And "obliterate" is already a perfectly good word, and there are others to choose from too.
This video is very interesting and touches on something I've been experiencing a little as someone who's recently moved from UK -> Japan to study. Tldr its the "f" word its a common word found on restaurant menus and shortened to refer to cigarettes. As you said, context matters a lot, but I've noticed other speakers of [international american] english take offence regardless of context (being an exchange its not uncommon to discuss one's favourite home country foods)
I used to work in a place that was bilingual with English and Chinese. Periodically someone not working there would visit and hear me or others use the verbal contraction for 哪一个 (like you mentioned) and would give me a shocked look that I would have to sort out.
It’s very disrespectful to Chinese people that the US is foisting their baggage on them relating to the awful treatment of Black slaves. I think it is cultural colonialism but i can take it down a notch if that is to hysterical. No other language should change nor a professor be fired because your countrymen are sensitive to real injustices by your country’s history unrelated to a 3rd party.
This is my first time hearing that "cleft" even has a sexual meaning. The only reason I could think of for someone too be offended about that word is maybe thinking that are making fun of a cleft palate
A friend of my parents' mom was from New Zealand. She was at a party with her American husband and tried making smalltalk by asking people if they made a good living. The problem? The New Zealand slang for that at the time was "do you make a good screw?" which means something decidedly different in US culture.
That's one hell of an icebreaker. I wonder how long you could keep the conversation going without anyone figuring it out. "Do you make a good screw?" "my wife and I do alright." "what do you do?" etc.
My standpoint is essentially your own, just even more empathic. Precisely as you said, words change meaning over time and words also change meaning depending on context and co-text. Pragmatics matters an enormous deal. With the phenomenon of _banter_ in particular, even curse words can be endearing; in contrast, just any word can be offensive in a proper context. 90% of the present-day censoring language, in my experience, is really based on unreasonable over-sensitivity and on the authorities behind it not getting (or refusing to admit) these basic facts. It is really getting out of hand and way beyond its original purpose. It is already happening that so very basic and essential concepts like death or the colour black are getting cancelled linguistically. It's both ridiculous and scary. Death exists. The colour black exists. Neither of them has been designed to be scary or offensive, they existed even before human language was created. Also eating disorders or abuse exist. The German dictator existed too. But cancelling talking about these won't solve the problem. On the contrary, it will only make things worse. People need to talk about these serious issues, and while doing so, they shouldn't be obstructed by thousands of words that must not be uttered. The only reasonable exception to me are terms specifically coined to be deeply offensive or derogatory from the very beginning and never developed any (stable) other meaning.
Just thinking out loud, I wonder how much this tracks or doesn't track the rise of the internet? In cyber-space, it's very simple and easy to implement a search for particular strings (see also the "Scunthorpe problem"!). It's very hard to automate something that filters for context. Where censoring of some type is desired, to implement a context-based censoring system would be hugely more resource-intensive than a context-free one. In meat-space, where an actual human would be in the similar place of assessing language use, it's trivial to filter for context. We instinctively process context anyway, so it'd be no great resource burden to design your censoring rules to be based on context/inferred intent.
@@zak3744 I would believe that the internet, and how we use it, is an important factor here. At first, I wasn't sure what OP was talking about regarding death, but then I remembered how TikToks and similar styles of video often say "unalive". This seems more common in captions. Some videos that talk about death a lot may be "bad", i.e. objectionable to advertisers, and thus trip the simple word search filters. Given the amount of user-generated content online now, it would be expensive to always consider context. In the opposite direction, I've heard that on Tumblr, it is good etiquette to avoid censorship and euphemisms for sensitive topics. This empowers users to filter out what they don't want to see. Black humor can get posted, but I don't have to see it the day after my mom dies.
@@zak3744 I'm all but an expert on the matter, but I would guess that context-ignoring censure is definitely associated with the rise of the internet. Precisely because it is so hard to design a censoring system capable of (correctly) evaluating the context and inferred intent. It is just hard for machines to truly understand pragmatics - hard, or too expensive, or both. Which then gives rise to precisely such desperate, ridiculous coinages as "unalive" instead of "kill". (Though, as we know from the many anectodal examples, even many people apparently have troubles correctly interpreting the context, which then leads to unfair accusations of racism, slurring, etc. where there very apparently has been no such intention.) However, in authoritative regimes (present or past), many words or ideas have also been censured mercilessly, regardless of the context, so even if this has become a particularly prevalent phenomenon in the present day, it is far from a new concept.
@@zak3744I assumed that this was about the internet. The only reason I've seen people change their language around death is to avoid algorithmic censorship.
When my family moved from the USA to England there were two expressions we stopped using: "bolloxed up," to mean confused, and "fanny," to mean rear end.
Hah! Yeah, fanny means the same thing here in Australia as in England. It causes considerable laughter here when Americans use it, or even worse 'fanny pack'.
Definitely not nothing offensive, but a funny little example. Short background I'm American, he's British, a low-level celebrity, and a person idol for my career field. After emailing a bit back and forth I asked if I could drop in on him a bit. He and his wife ended up taking me out to dinner. Great night, talked about books, music, work, a bunch of things. Super smart guy. At the end of the night he turns to me and says, "Would you fancy a slug?" I was glad I am vegetarian and..."I don't think so...". When we realized it was the equivalent of having a shot we all had a laugh. And then we talked about the differences in UK/US English.
You don't know the first thing about politics if you actually believe that. Making mountains out of molehills is the name of the game. It's absurd to believe that everyone is playing fair
I've literally seen the scenario where a politician used a word in the proper way, but it rhymed with a slur so he was dragged through the mud and had to make a public apology for saying "niggardly", which is unrelated to the slur it sounds like and is a proper part of English. Nothing more to the story than easily offended and poorly educated people making a problem out of a word that rhymes with a slur.
5:24 that’s not just Cab Calloway singing, and not just an animation of Cab Calloway, but those animations are rotoscope, in other words they are drawn over frames of a film of Cab Calloway
I live in Australia and New Zealand, which adds yet another layer of complexity because words sometimes gain differing connotations Downunder to their American, British, etc usages. Example: the word ‘root’ (noun and, particularly, as a verb) is-or most certainly was post WW2-impolite slang for sexual intercourse. The word’s use by Americans, particularly in relation to sporting or political support, can still provoke snorts or guffaws of laughter to Aussie and Kiwi men(!) of baby boomer or older generations. However, I notice that American cultural imperialism has largely robbed the word among younger generations of those schoolyardish connotations. Such is the life of language.
I think that you are confusing "root" and "rut" (which, as you say, is pronounced much the same in Aus). Admittedly, these both have multiple meanings. Funnily enough, the other more commonly used meanings of rut could be folded back in to make it sound a dull or unsatisfying shag.
@jozenthejozarian2564 Also Aussie, and I can assure you that he's absolutely correct. Root is used that way here, eg 'get rooted' means precisely the same as 'get f***ed', and there are a number of related phrases and usages.
As an American I will happily have a wild night of unbridled passionate lovemaking with my husband and use sports as an excuse. It sounds a lot more fun than the alternative (having to watch and cheer for sports)
"How's tricks?" is a phrase I love using, but can't anymore, because everyone under the age of 80 thinks I'm calling them a prostitute. It makes me sad.
In my nuclear family, when the girls were little, we used to use the word "piddle" for going to the loo quickly. And then came the time when I was properly busting for a piddle and said something like "papa gotta piddle" a couple of times quite quickly. No when I need to hit the head, there is occasionally mention of a certain lake in Mexico. We do enjoy making our own euphemisms that double as in-jokes.
My usual go-to for "Miserly" is "tight", frequentlly expressed as "tight as a gnat's chuff", though I once opined in front of an aged aunt that someone was "tight in every situation", and I later learned that she got the impression that the person was perpetually drunk...
@@battleb0ng420 So I'm speaking from a UK perspective, but yes, here indeed it can refer to lack of money (as in "money is a bit tight this month"); but also in the way I mentioned, as in parsimony. I think "tight" in that latter sense might be a contraction of "tightwad"... And yes, it is weird :) These things vary even in our tiny island. I mean, in Scotland, if you're miserly you might get called a "mingebag"!
I am a person that enjoys language, and learning the origin of words. Discussions like this are always attractive and saddening to my ears. I wish that we could all take an extra moment in times like this to explore the perspective of the "offender," to see if we truly believe that they meant to offend, and if not, perhaps just quietly abide. Finally, I am struggling not to put a list of strange ways to say, "Go to the toilet," at the end.
It's pretty common for the phrase "turn into a pumpkin" to come up when I'm chatting online with European friends in different time zones. It also tends to leave them completely bewildered whenever I say it. It's happened to me with at least three different people and I never learn.
Oh my god, someone else who uses that phrase!! The only place I’ve ever heard it is from my grandma, and I use it because she does! Rural Midwest/ US I’m guessing?
In middle school I was being harassed and said "she harassed me" to another student. They only heard of it in the sexual context and thought I was lying because she did not inappropriately touch me.
I can't believe you got through the entire video without mentioning shibboleths. Most of this nonsense isn't coming from a place of hurt, it's a power trip on the part of the person who is almost always not part of the group they claim would be offended. Browbeating someone into using or not using words is a power trip.
CAB CALLOWAY was not White. Cab Calloway was biracial, and was considered an African-American at the time. He had much lighter skin than most of his cohorts. Look it up
Twenty-five years ago, I worked at Wendy's for a month. One day I told my manager I was going to "hit the head". She thought I said someone had hit their head and went into panic mode. I had to quickly intervene and explain the idiom, and I haven't used the phrase since.
@@ocatwam5890it is that other activity. And the other term for that but with the other set of parts I've seen people call "ringing the devil's doorbell".
The phrase that i always found humorous is, "my dogs are barking." Meaning your feet are tired from being on them a long time. You can hear John Candy say it in Plains, Trains, and Automobiles.
I think, as with most things in life, things like this really shouldn't be treated as black-and-white (is that phrase still OK?) but need to be approached with understanding and nuance. I definitely think that there are cases where it is entirely legitimate to ask people to stop using a word, because some words can have a real and serious emotional toll on a significant number of people, and choosing to inflict harm on other people when you don't have to, just for your own convenience (or stubbornness) is, frankly, just being an asshole, and that's not OK. *However,* the problem in a lot of cases nowadays is that many of these complaints are actually completely disingenuous, and IMHO that's also not OK. They are _not_ made because anybody is _actually_ offended, they are made because people have decided to _pretend_ to be offended as a way for to get publicity, or exert power and control over other people's thoughts and lives. Even among people who knew that "spook" used to have racist connotations in some cases (which I'd bet there are even a fair number of black people who don't know), I would bet that there is almost nobody who actually genuinely was offended by the adjective "spooky", or using it for things like Halloween, without somebody else _telling_ them they should be offended first. The outrage is essentially entirely invented, and not actually genuine at all. And I think that sort of thing really should be called out for the manipulative bullshit it actually is.
As an ally of the bovine community, I find your use of the term “bullshit” to be highly problematic. There’s nothing false or unreliable about cattle excrement.
I was dating a Colombian woman a few years ago, and I was out meeting her friends. For some reason, when we toasted, I decided to toast with a cutesy thing I learned studying abroad in Germany: Prostietoastie. Because Prost is a toast. Anyway, they thought I shouted PROSTITUTA, and it was problematic.
In high-school, whenever me or my white friends would mention “salt and vinegar chips” one of our brown friends would sarcastically exclaim in feigned horror “omg you can’t say that, ur white!”
Reminds me of the Bo Burnham bit where he had the audience finish his words and then offered "salt and vi...", to which the entire room unknowingly said the rest.
One that I like (as a probably-should-be-replaced words) is the sewing term, faggotting. Now it’s a bit antiquated, since it’s a stitch done by hand. It allows you to connect two pieces of fabric without them touching each other. The thread that spans the pieces are then tightly bound by the thread before moving on to the next stitch. Again it’s a bit outdated stitch so there isn’t a commonly accepted term as a replacement. Obviously the term makes sense etymologically, but MAN is it an awkward term for historical sewing research. Either way I agree with your end point. Like if someone tells you that a thing hurts them, it feels easy enough to at least try and be respectful of that. It’s not them censoring you, it’s them making a request. It’s not like they’re duct taping your mouth shut. You gotta work with people, why antagonize them unnecessarily?
I think I'd put the line a step back from that. There's a difference between sharing your reaction to someone else's language use/discussing differences in language use and making a request that they change it. Demands are obviously even more impositional than requests, but even a request polite prioritises your own language use as a standard that other people should align with rather than vice versa.
Brit here. We legitimately have a (for Americans: think of a golf-ball sized meat loaf or several of them; or maybe it could be meat-loaf shaped) a dish called 'faggots' (have it with pease pudding. Pretty tasty). I'm sorry; there is no way around calling it anything else, because it is not a meat loaf. It is what it is. Plus what we call a cigarette would get our faces slapped in the USA as it's a fag. There will always be cultural misunderstandings. But I guess, an American in the UK would have to put up with it; but maybe a Brit in the USA shouldn't use those words even if in an ordinary (to the Brit) context. Americans should leave their 'fanny bags' back home over here (female genitalia here) and talk about bum bags instead. Oh, but wait ...
@@zak3744 Like, making requests is fine, though. I'm a grown adult who can say 'no' if she wants to. Also, "Please don't call me this," is a different request to "Please don't use this word when I'm around," is a different request to "Please never use this word." Just as an example, I've been asked by some usually-older GSM folks not to call them queer, and I'll instantly agree to that; but if they were to ask me to not use it for myself or others who actively prefer queer, I'm going to say no. (I realise this isn't exactly the point you were making; just adding thoughts.🤷♀)
To a point I agree, but when being offended comes from a lack of education on the part of the listener I feel it is their problem to deal with. If we all edit ourselves to fit the lowest level of understanding we all lose the ability to communicate intelligently.
So yeah, im brasillian and I was traveling in america with some friends. Back at the time the word "miga", a short form for "amiga" (the female word for friend in Portuguese) was popular here. I dont think i need to explain how that caused us some problems 😂
You need to explain it to me - I'm 55 years old and have lived in many different parts of the US, but I have never heard of the term "miga" at all. I can't even find a negative meaning for it with google.
I saw a debate on Threads about whether "bullet point" should be eschewed in favor of "focus point" due to violent language despite the word "bullet" in that term has nothing to do with ammunition. There was a surprising amount of agreement, and someone who agreed added that "bloodshot" is another gun reference we should get rid of. THAT one sent me over the edge...
I was going to make an entirely separate video on that. The list I saw that on said we should all say “feed two birds with one scone,” which is so stupid. And also, you can feed way more birds than that
"Golden era Simpsons quotes live in my head rent free" You probably would have enjoyed being a guest at our turn-of-the-century family dinners where my siblings and I _Darmok and Jalad'd_ our conversations in Simpson-reference idioglossia, much to the bafflement of everyone else present.
A lot of the time, I think these types of conversations result in the Streisand effect. I’m in my fifties and I grew up in Phoenix. When I was in my twenties, there was a controversy in Mesa (a neighboring town) because there was a place called “Spook Hill” that some community activists wanted to rename because it was offensive. In my mind, “spook” meant only 1 thing, and that was a ghost. I didn’t know about the spy denotation yet either. Now, I honestly have no idea why Spook Hill was called Spook Hill. Maybe there was a racist origin. But at the time I, along with all my friends, was surprised to find out that spook could be a racial slur. I had never heard it used that way … at least not that I realized. It was actually used in the movie Back to the Future. When Biff’s buddies toss Marty into the trunk, a band member jumps out of the car and one of Biff’s friends says “Hey, beat it spook, this don’t concern you.” I had seen that movie probably 50 times so I had heard the line, but I’d always assumed it was some kind of 50’s insult that you might say to anyone … if you lived in 1955. It never crossed my mind that it was a racial thing. So it wasn’t until I heard about the Spook Hill controversy that I even realized "spook" could be a racial slur. In other words, it was the activists whining about it all over TV and radio that taught me that particular meaning. And to be honest, I doubt I’ve heard it used that way in the 30 years since, other than an occasional watching of Back to the Future. I think we keep these kinds of things alive by obsessing over them. If you asked your average 15 year old what spook means, I’m guessing the only definition they could give you would be a ghost, and they would think of it as an archaic word at that. And the adjective “spooky” is even one step farther away from the noun, meaning eerie or creepy. Seriously, has anyone ever heard “spooky” used as a racial descriptor? So why should all English speakers stop using it in it's other contexts?
I find phrases like "long time no see" similar. It was definitely originally insulting. However, now it's just English we use without thinking. For visual communication, see the glove controversy in animation.
The folksy phrase I like to bring out when the situation calls for it is "frog strangler," meaning a torrential downpour. I had no idea Werewolf Bar Mitzvah was sung by Donald Glover, but listening again I can totally hear it. I knew he wrote for the show but I never made that connection.
With a little tangential thinking, I am certain that we could taboo every word ever produced. At the extreme, language is akin to cultural appropriation.
Just found the channel. Loved it at once. Liked and subscribed by the five minute mark. One suggestion… Phases, like “the last straw” or the “straw that broke the camel’s back” should not be used. They are offensive to turtles. (And in one case, camels.)
This video was swell! I don't know why anyone would get sore over the word "spooky." If I'm feeling gay and I hear the word "spooky", it doesn't turn me into a pill or a wet blanket.
Thank you for the Cab Calloway clip and reference. I've always loved his version of St. James Infirmary Blues, but yeah... the ghost has a real "umm..." vibe these days.
My maternal grandfather was from the UK. Even though he'd lived in the states since shortly after the War and did his best to blend in, he still used many words and phrases that Americans don't commonly use. I did not know these were things other kids might not understand and as we spent a lot of time as kids at their house, I picked up a random sampling of them from him. So I'd talk about using the loo or say "let's have a butcher's". As an adult, I lived in the south for a bit and that was a cultural exchange to be sure. Although I think nowadays it might be less so because of how social media has made it so in effect our community is almost always global.
The dumbest example I can recall was a history teacher having us discuss naval history I was discussing sea shanties, and I was sent to the principal's office for saying FOLK music and SHIP songs because the teacher had a dirty mind and thought I was saying vulgarities
Thank you for this video, It was short enough to hole my attention and you spoke in an amusing manner which helped the fact. I don't leave the house so often so I don't have any funny stories to leave in the comments, nor do I want to give you money. But I'll take the 15 minutes of entertainment and keep moving on with meaninglessness. ❤
@@anglaismoyen It was renamed when shown in Canada as well (for not as obvious reasons?), but now it's back (on Amazon Prime) under the original name, "Spooks".
A spook is a ghost in Dutch. Ghosts are invisible. Spies are also supposed to be invisible, in a way of speaking. So it makes sense to name them after an older English word (borrowed from Dutch) for ghosts.
Would love to see a future video on whether there are ever times you *shouldn't* learn a language - I feel like you would have a very interesting take. I've seen this mainly argued in regards to native languages, where it's a highly emotional ethical dillema of survival of the language vs. more aspects of a culture being stolen and watered down. Being Australian, the example I'm very familiar with is across the ditch in New Zealand/Aotearoa with the drastic rise in Te Reo Maori in the last 5 years from the very deliberate effort by the NZ government. My friend's NZ family spoke about how they've witnessed themselves, but especially their children start casually using Te Reo words in conversation. So by all means, it's been a hugely successful revival of a language that was at one point dying. And yet, there's a lot of mixed feelings about it. In particular, on a very personal level there was a comment I saw on reddit from a Maori person who spoke about how they weren't necessarily against the language being much more widely spoken, but also grieved the loss of immediate kinship and recognition they once had when hearing Te Reo Maori signified that they were speaking to another Maori person.
Buddy of mine is Cherokee and their take on it is basically summarized as “There aren’t many of our native speakers left and there are very few speakers in general. If you learn it, you help keep it alive.” I suspect it varies so much person to person, language to language, and culture to culture that there’s no real way to have a singular discussion that doesn’t leave somebody out.
Calling someone a "spook" as a slur when you yourself are running around in ghost drag all year is a bold move.
@@unvergebeneid 🔥 🔥 🔥
🦞lol
1. The KKK has between 3000 and 6000 active members in the entire world (for context at the most that's still less that 2 hundredths of a percent of the total us population... it's literally 0.0017%) I'd suggest you actually come into the 21st century instead of pretending it's still the 1930s. The KKK are an irrelevancy in the modern world
2. Secondly, the outfits they wear are religious robes. They are not dressed like "ghosts". The hood is a Catholic garment called a capirote. They are worn to show penance and are still used in many Spanish speaking countries today. Fun fact, this is also where the Dunce Cap originates. Saying they're dressed like ghosts is an insult to the religious sects the garment represent. And the irony of all this is that the KKK dressed like this while actively persecuting Catholics
Or you can call them a Casper, but white boys of a certain age might be enthused that they are compared to the lead from _Starship Troopers_
Well played.
An issue I have with stuff like this is when the derogatory usage is super obscure and most people wouldn’t even know about it, you’re just calling attention to something that really doesn’t need to be uncovered. While it’s obviously good to be educated I don’t see a big use for knowing obscure outdated slurs you‘ll likely never encounter (and tbh you can usually tell by the context if a word is being used in an offensive way even if you’ve never heard the specific term). At best it brings to mind something negative whenever you hear a word you previously thought innocent and at worst gives bad actors more ammo.
That said though if someone feels personally offended by a word, IMO it shouldn’t be a big deal to just not say it around them, even if you find their reasons a little dumb (given that it wouldn’t make communicating unreasonably hard). It’s not too different from a grandma not wanting to be called “meemaw” even though it’s not an offensive name and other people might like it. Though, in my experience usually people who get offended over obscure etymologies are looking for something to be mad about for whatever reason, or as you said the word isn’t actually the heart of the issue.
"IMO it shouldn’t be a big deal to just not say it around them, even if you find their reasons a little dumb" -- Exactly this. I personally think the "anything rope related is off limits" is a bit out of pocket but working it into every conversation once you know the person doesn't like it crosses a line and bleeds into bullying.
yeah words are only slurs if they are used as one me personally ill only bring something up if i am not comfortable with someone using that word because of the connotations but it should be a case by case thing imo
Agreed, especially regarding giving bad actors more ammo!
I have an example to trot out on this topic: the "ok" hand symbol. A white-power organization started using it a few years ago as a dog whistle. When other people caught on, some said that no one was "allowed" to use it anymore, aka canceled.
Since I heard that message from the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, my mind immediately went to the Star of David. It made me wonder what would happen if that same white-power group started using the Star of David as a symbol of their own. Obviously, that is a very unlikely scenario, but it seems like a lot of power to give to the bad actors.
Indeed. My portfolio of Black specific slurs has just increased by one.
I'm with Dr Jones (And there goes the Aqua song. Drat) on this. If it's not widely understood to be offensive, don't force your conceptions onto others. Personally I find that intensely arrogant. You're expecting the world to change because you are offended by the word "grass" or something equally innocent like "tea" or "book". If rope makes you think of hanging, that's an extremely worrying association that you should get help for, not something you should expect everyone to not use in your presence.
The same goes in the other direction though. The antiquated miserly synonym? Probably shouldn't use that one. It's amazingly close to an intensely potent racial slur, and there's a perfectly serviceable alternative that's multiple orders of magnitude more commonly used.
It honestly reminds me of a symbol still used by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism as well as the Akan, Hopi, Navajo, and Tlingit peoples. (Thanks Wikipedia for the list). A certain early-mid 20th century German political party decided to misappropriate that symbol and now there are entire religions and ethnic groups that get to explain to every under-educated white person that sees their culture "No, this has nothing to do with those jerks. It's millennia old. They stole it"
Personally I wish people would work towards de-stigmatizing some taboos. By giving the opposite of a concept weight, you necessarily have to give weight to the other side. Can't have up without down, light without dark, anti-racism without racism. If you want to "defeat" a concept? Quit giving it any weight. No sexism isn't a state where you care about sex/gender, it's a state where those things cease to matter. Boosting women or people of color because they were harmed in the past is a wonderful first step but it should be transitory because by saying "I am going to give this class of people benefits" you are perpetuating the idea that those distinctions deserve different treatment.
6:44 Queen Elizabeth can move in any direction, but the Archbishop of Canterbury can only move diagonally.
It wasn't even a Queen originally, it was more of an Advisor or Prime Minister.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeit's called the vizier is other countries still
Well, he's an archbishop, so he can move diagonally or jump once like a knight.
As Gene Robinson pointed out to Jon Stewart in 2009, sometimes a bishop can move in any direction...
She dead
Being misunderstood and thought of as intentionally trying to be offensive happens frequently in Spanish when trying to talk to other Spanish speakers in Latinamerica.
My favorite example is "arrecho" which is slang for angry/upset in my country but to Colombians and Panamanians in the room I was proclaiming to be "horny" aloud because that's what the same word said the same way means to both cultures.
Ahhh you’re from Central America? Viví en Belice y mi mamá es de guatemala and she uses the word in the same way hahah
@@nikki-diary yeah, it gets really awkward among strangers but more often than not it's a laugh
I remember being a kid and laughing every single time they said "coger" as a synonym for "tomar/agarrar" in a movie or show with European Spanish dubs
@@marialuz7301 As an European Spanish speaker coger sounds completely normal I always forget you all think its horny
When I studied abroad in Spain I met someone named Concha. I hope she never goes to South America
Making a Ghostbusters reference while simultaneously making the quote peculiarly illustrative: *chef's kiss*
I'm a black man, and spooky should NOT be cancelled. The derogatory term "spook" was old and passe when I was a kid, and I'm 56 now. I haven't heard anyone use it in the derogatory form in ages.
For sounds from your mouth hole to hurt someone is ridiculous. Blah. Boom. Did that hurt? No because its just sounds from your word hole. If someone is offits their fault. I got call3d every name in the book. Literally didnt do anything. People need to toughen up. I also got chased home by seniors in 4th grade. Ild rather be called names. It doesnt hurt!
@@voradorhylden3410 "Blah. Boom. Did that hurt?"
Yeah, let's be coy, and ignore context. Scroll past.
@SiriusMined context doesnt matter its sounds from a hole. Thats it. It doesnt hurt.
The only time I've ever heard it that way was in Back to the Future and it was already outdated then since it happened in the 50s
Hell the only time it gets revived to be used that way is in South Park and The Boondocks because of the professional racist characters
Like does anyone actually use coon as a slur outside of hardcore KKK members? Like South Park was able to call Cartman the Coon and it wasn't censored at all
I've mostly only heard it movies like back to the future where it was presented as outdated
Like does anyone call white boys Pecker woods?
petition to bring back wifwolf
But do you yiff with your wifwolf ? (i'm sorry)
@@revangerangyo wtf
@@Thefrogbread I had to 😂
What if people understand it as whiffwolf?
i saw different creators mention it too and people being excited about it. and as language works, maybe we will be that lucky
“Turns out I forgot about Rule 34 and furries more broadly” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Using the transcript tab on videos, I have found this is said at 14:45, if anyone wished to know when it was said
A costly, and psychically damaging mistake.
@@jmvr You're a hero to comment etiquette
Wifwolf is a nifty word.
@@jmvrthanks, dude, I always hate when a comment on a long video is missing a timestamp
Code monkey is a phrase commonly used to refer to programming interns and other low skill programmers. I once used it and it upset a person of color for the obvious reason (though I was not referring to them or anyone else in the room as such). It was as simple as apologizing, explaining that the meaning of the phrase has nothing to do with race, and assuring them I wouldn’t use the word around them since it was upsetting. ‘Tis easy to accommodate people’s emotional well being if one merely tries.
In Brasil, referring to black people as monkey is probably the worst offense you can direct at a black person. This caused some funny confusion when I was chatting with some vietnamese friends, since they used monkey to refer to themselves acting in a playful and dumb way.
@@r.rodrigues9929it's crazy because all humans are monkeys
We're all stupid monkeys. People are way too sensitive nowadays.
Car mechanics were often called grease monkeys. Was not a racist term.
@@r.rodrigues9929 Whereas I've met Chinese people who were called monkey (in Mandarin) as an effective and hurtful slur. In fact, downright distressing slur in at least one case.
Years ago I told a British person that I would, “be right back, just have to go potty real quick.” a somewhat cutsie way of saying that I was going to use the bathroom. He laughed and explained that to him I’d said I was just going to go off and go crazy, but that I’d be right back.
And the older you get, the more you do both.
I mean, considering the condition of most public bathrooms, could go either way.
As an English person, this seems weird to me! Potty as a Euphemism for slight madness is not used that much any more. If you had said that to me, I'd have thought more that you were going to use a toddler's toilet & would have thought you very strange, laughed and mocked you! 🤣
@@Hayden1969-ws4vy that's what I would've thought too
"misuse the facilities" is now my favourite euphemism for that activity
There was that guy recently who had the police called on him for telling a fellow customer that he was going to "blow up" a Home Depot bathroom.
That sounds like you're going to knock one out to me.
Mine too.
what activity??
@@RilianSharpsame
Reminds me. Once I was using the urinal and heard a homeless guy talking to another homeless guy and say “I don’t fuck with no sp**ks, know what I’m saying?”. I was 19 and didn’t know what the word was so I looked it up and found the answer on Urban Dictionary. Later I mentioned it to my mother and she was like “I haven’t heard that term since the 70s”
Speaking of words having very different meanings in different contexts, Bart Simpson once demanded that Principal Skinner teach him a swear word he didn't already know. Skinner whispers in Bart's ear, and Bart responds in surprise, "That's a bad word?!" Skinner replies, "As a noun it is." My friends and I were trying to figure out whether there's really a word like that, and I eventually came up with one... (apologies in advance to anyone offended by this)...
"Snatch"
I always thought it was “prick,” but I like your idea!
@@Birdie518 you'e both right!
@@Birdie518 Thank you! I did think of "prick" at one point, but then later I drew a blank trying to remember it, and it was driving to me crazy. 😆
The two suggestions aren't swear words. I figured swear words have to do with blasphemy. Scatological terms are something else.
@keouine They would qualify as bad words in Bart's estimation, I'm sure (esp with the thrill of making Skinner teach it to him). But if you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears!
I was singing along with a K-pop song that I was listening to through my headphones. This did not go over well with the person walking past me who was unfamiliar with the Korean words for “I” and “You”
On the subject of free speech and context, I've been triggered recently over the censorship of perfectly useful, everyday words; words like 'sex,' 'suicide and 'die.' Facebook is a particularly egregious offender, bleeping out those words, and others whenever they appear in audio and/or video posts. What's your take on this practice?
I get you so much.
Basically, it started as a practice on certain social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, UA-cam, etc.) as a means of preventing the post from getting shadowbanned/age restricted/straight up deleted. (I also see it in fandom spaces used to prevent certain names of characters/media/etc. from showing up in searches, but that's a separate issue). On that level, I get it. but it's also incredibly problematic because:
1. It makes it hard to mute those words on platforms/extensions that allow muting words, because you have so many variations of censorship patterns to take into consideration.
2. Especially with euphemisms, it lessens the weight those words carry, almost making a joke out of getting around saying these serious issues out loud.
3. It further stigmatizes issues like suicide and sex, like those are "dirty words", so to speak.
1984
I'm not speaking for anybody but myself here. I'm not the representative from the African American delegation lol, but being black and gay and someone who took linguistics, i have thoughts on reclaimed slurs and words with old offensive meanings. These are like Asimovs Laws of robotics for how fundamental they are. 1. Words mean what ppl use them to mean 2. Words =\= their etymologies. To use a less charged example I have seen people weaponize the idea that the word C00n is a racial slur. Of course it was a racial slur in the context that it was used by white people about black people at the turn of the 20th century. But it has a different meaning the way that's been used since the middle of the 20th century by black people exclusively about other black people. That's not really a racial slur and it requires a certain amount of cultural understanding to know that. The irony is that by sticking to the original meaning were attacking black ppl for calling out internalized racism, tokenism etc. That said be normal about it LMAO. Don't be a know it all. Don't try to debate someone into agreeing with you on the use of these words. Be kind. It's free lol. When I'm around older gay men i try to be considerate of the fact that the British word for a cigarette still has a lot of sting for some of them. If I know it bothers someone i don't use it even tho I have fully reclaimed that word for myself.
I worked on a project where the black linguists were unanimous that words like “coonhound” are innocuous and other people shouldn’t be offended on their behalf but should know when it’s not their turn to give a f*ck. And especially to your point, there’s idioms like what I assume you’re referencing - ABC - that aren’t for me to have an opinion on at all
@languagejones6784 that's cool. What was it called?
As a certified representative of the Council of White Individuals (kidding god I do not want to be associated with half of them), it's that last bit that's really important. Know the context and don't try to use things like this as a way to say a slur and then call it okay on a technicality. Just be normal about your language. If someone is uncomfortable with a word, don't use it, it's not that difficult. And don't intentionally say controversial words just because "free speech". It should be common sense. My gay friend can call me the f slur because they've reclaimed it AND I'm not offended by it. I could use it with them despite being straight (mostly...) but I don't find a need to, and more importantly I'm not gonna use that like a pass to say it to random people.
I'm British and this reminds me of a different point, but the online world is international. I would never think twice about using the word fag (to mean cigarette) or spook (to mean spy). And it works both ways. Watching Avatar the Last Airbender was weird at first for me because 'bender' is a homophobic slur over here. I figured they didn't know that and got used to its new definition. Like, communication is about trying to understand what's in the other person's mind anyhow. Not override it with your own understanding of their words.
@@ValQuinn I would've never guessed that about bender, we also use it as a word for like a wild night of partying and drugs, or at least drugs. I think the drugs are the main part though. Actually I think they're sometimes or often more than a day. That's a perfect example then of the words you listed where especially the first one (I'm comfortable enough saying or typing it except this is the internet so I'd rather avoid it and figure people on a language channel would understand this instead of just saying it's weird). Where if they said that on a show as an American I would've been and some would be surprised and confused. Or now I know what it means but it still stands out to my ears, despite not thinking of it as remotely offensive given the context. More like "oh there was that word. I probably should avoid quoting this part if convenient..."
But yes it's literally just communication, I just saw a short about a piece in the Museum of Modern Art that's a painting of just text forming a bibliography, looks very scholarly and normal like a page from a book but the sources are all related to linguistics and communicating and stuff. Art, like language, is just a way of expressing or communicating things from our brain, it's just that a lot of art is less direct or harder to interpret like someone's random conlang, maybe they have a few words you can guess from context and tone and a few similar sounding ones to English, but you'll never understand exactly the thoughts behind the art. Which is why we don't really use art to communicate for practical reasons. So language is art and art is language (or are they not because people use them to describe separate things? I'd say it's both depending on context, so it's pointless to be pedantic about disagreeing with someone saying "um, actually... technically they're the same" because they aren't being used the same. It's just interesting to point out and discuss or think about with curious people)
“I need to see a man about a horse” is what my Grandpa said when he wanted to go to the restroom. I heard it so often growing up that I say it as well and I’ve received some very strange looks because of it.
Thank you for that bit of linguistic history.
Meanwhile in Germany, my mother and I just call the restrooms "whereto" when we're in public.
E.g. it's intermission during a concert. One tells the other "I'm going whereto for a bit."
Same 😆
That's interesting because I'm Australian and my grandpa used to use that idiom almost exactly but it was seeing a man about a dog instead of a horse, he was from specifically an island off the coast of South Australia called Kangaroo Island, and spent most of his life on farms, if you don't mind me asking, where is your grandpa from? I find it interesting that the idiom is widespread enough that Taylor used almost the same idiom from the other side of the pacific, but it's still obscure enough that most people seem to have never heard of it, must be some kind of farmer connection
@@beesinpyjamas9617 I'm English. It's "see a man about a dog" here, too. Not as common as it used to be, but still used often enough that most people would get what you mean.
It’s a phrase known by all older generations in Ireland, wouldn’t be used much. But is generally understood by everyone!
my favorite obscure phrase is "you want i should?". something i have no idea on the origins of but understand to be a very odd "translation" of "do you want me to?".
while searching for this phrase's origins i've come across things stating "the american south" ,"american east coast mobsters", "a poorly translated german phrase".
I think its interesting that the way we call people stupid or crazy keeps evolving where we have medical terms that get used as insults that stop being medical terms and the new medical terms then become insults.
Like, the point is to be insulting and offensive so until people decide to stop calling people stupid or crazy, that will keep happening
This is a myth - "idiot" and "imbecile" were insults for centuries before a medico decided to use them in a diagnostic guideline.
You would never call an actually crazy person crazy as an insult. Same with the r-word or a lot of other cancelled words. Like we want to hurt someone's feelings, we'll always be using whatever achieves that result lol.
the main thing was that the medical terms didn’t start as medical terms, compared to autistic or something now where the og meaning was medical
Euphemism treadmill.
the use got extended to being synonymous with calling someone "foolish" i.e. acting like a clown
In the north of England we "call a spade a bloody shovel" which reduces the ambiguity.
We wouldn’t want to trigger anyone who might be primed to respond to any phrase which might be construed as a reminder that the afore mentioned ‘spade or bloody shovel’ had been the tool of a pair of your northern neighbours, Burke and Bloody Hare.
@harryburleigh8358 why would anyone be triggered by an early example of recycling?
@@ianchristian7949 Aye. You’re right - It is not too soon to acknowledge that Burke and Hare earned the right to be numbered among the precociously innovative.
What do you call an unbloodied shovel, though? 🤔
As a tweetaalige South African, I can't imagine how we'd manage without spookie
And when you mentioned queens, it conjured the lyrics, "and the queens we use would not excite you"
Now I have that earworm stuck in my head
What does "spookie" mean? (I mean, I can guess, but you spelled it differently)
@egg_bun_ it's Afrikaans for "little ghost" 👻
I recently heard of people getting offended by cartoon character Yosemite Sam and his use of the phrase "wait a cotton pickin' minute" as it was OBVIOUSLY a reference to black slavery. I offered there were plenty of white sharecroppers who picked cotton as well, and that Yosemite Sam is a parody of an Old West character and not a Southern one, but I got shut down by "you know what they meant by it." I am not sure THEY did.
oh, the irony... as I was watching this, it was interrupted by a commercial saying "Spooky deals on [SomeFoodDeliveryService[]"
The algorithms definitely make things weird. I bet everyone gets “spooky” ads
Back in '09 a feral cat birthed and raised a litter of five in the dumpster enclosure ay my workplace. I fed her, then her kittens, until they were old enough to go out on their own.
One stayed around the property. Though I'd known him his whole life he was still very leery of me for about four months. I'm a cat servant, cats need names, so because he was so cautious and ready to flee from any threat real or imagined I called him Spooky. It didn't hurt that he was coal black, a perfect Hallowe'en cat.
I never thought of the negative connotation (they as a native Chicagoan I was well aware that it could be used as a slur) nor did my coworkers.
Everything was fine until '15 when a coworker gave him a forever home. When she took him into her vet someone there was highly offended. Now he's S. in public, Spooky at home; you can't change a cat's name after they answer ti it.
Times change, that's for certain.
4:50 Very easy if it is a room full of French sailors! Using the word "corde" (rope in French) is considered bad luck on a boat (and on a theater stage). They would use a name that specifies the function of the rope or if it is a generic rope, with no predefined function, the word "bout". I think there might be an exception for the bell rope.
As someone who lives in China, boy does it take a minute to adjust to the fact that everyone is just saying "that"
I honestly didn't know the offensive connotation of "spade" and knew it as a word for a shovel or that one card. I always thought it was strange that spade was so rarely used to mean shovel to where I imagined it must be a predominantly British usage. Knowing this, I won't avoid it like the plague but having that understanding I decidedly won't add "to call a spade a spade" to my idiolect. Great video as always!
Edit: I hadn't personally much to do with them outside my own errands so the discussion on definitions below is very insightful and I will try to read all of them.
In the US, a shovel has a rounded, deeper blade for moving dirt (like the playing card), while a spade has a square blade with a flat edge, but most people here will call a spade a shovel, or a "square shovel." If someone asks me for a spade, I have to stop and try to remember which kind of "shovel" they mean. Almost no one uses the word spade around where I live.
@@EnkiduShamesh To my a spade is a triangular, handheld shovel, like what you'd plant your garden flowers with.
@@ToastbackWhale Yeah, I kind of use it interchangeably with "trowel."
To be fair, the shovel “spade” doesn’t share the same origin as the other spade
I unfortunately knew it because of how spade tattoos are sometimes used among some non-black people (mostly white people) to signal that they are into black men.
No, we aren't going to stop using the word, "spooky." We're going to continue using all of these words as we always have and life will continue on as normal.
There's only one type of person that gets offended by things like this, and it's the one that goes out of their way to find a reason to be. It's perfectly acceptable to offend people like that.
The NDA vagueness is leaving me Scrabbling for answers
I was _wondering_ what 4 points meant!
Pretty sure that was the point
i've always said "goat rodeo" for a jumbled mess. my favorite weird idiom is calling something "mickey mouse" to mean it is poorly constructed. For example "this is the most mickey mouse piece of shit i've ever seen, who made this?" I will often say "we are reaching peak levels of mickey mouse with this hack" when a project is going off the rails
A good and measured take, thank you! Like you said, it comes down to context. I would resist attempts to force words that are commonly used innocuously out of the language - coming from the UK, the idea that we should stop saying spook or spade, which as far as I know have never been derogatory over here, for example
On the other hand the word you mentioned meaning miserly is markedly archaic, so while I'm not going to freak out any time I hear it, it's not something I would say myself, and unless the speaker seemed kinda socially oblivious, I would suspect a dog whistle
Good point on the dogwhistle. There was recently a scandal in the UK - more than one actually - where hobby groups and fandoms circulated lists of words to ban. They all ended up having a ton of Yiddish on them, most of which is neutral and not derogatory. It had the same energy as “the Vietnamese manicurists MUST be saying bad things about ME, because I don’t understand them”
You being British makes me think of the fact that being rational and kind goes both ways. If you were one of the people who still uses a word for cigarettes that some might find offensive, and you casually said the word to me as an American while clearly talking about a cigarette and using the word in a natural way, I wouldn't feel hurt nor would I attack you for it. Of course if the word was sensitive to me despite your innocent intentions I could politely tell you and you could avoid using it around me. Should be simple but people love to be mean and weird so I just do my best.
@@concerninghobbits5536 I was in London one weekend with a friend, and I still smoked back then, who I asked to borrow a cigarette but using the first 3 letters of the other word. An American women overheard and proceeded to lecture me about how rude and disrespectful it was, which was really confusing to me until she actually said the full word as I had never even considered the association until then. I played dumb, you can buy these meatball things that are disgusting in most supermarkets which are also called the full word, and acted confused about why calling someone a meatball was offensive which made her furious and stormed off. She seemed like the type that would pick up the box in the supermarket and take it to customer service to demand they stop selling them.
@ this is so funny because I'm clearly hearing in my head a British voice calling someone a meatball for being dumb, it may just be my imagination but it feels like I've actually heard it as a lighthearted insult.
@@languagejones6784 For what it's worth, I heard the "issue" with Yiddish from the other direction, the idea that Yiddish is so intimately associated with a particular ethnicity that white brits using Yiddish would have similar problems to white brits using AAVE, i.e. that the use of those words is potentially appropriative and disrespectful to the culture from which it came, especially if someone is saying them over an alternative English word just because the Yiddish version sounds funnier.
I'd note though that this is just how one person explained it to me so I can't vouch for if that was the main take on it or whatever, it very much could have been just dogwhistling and this guy got the wrong end of the stick.
So, a semi common idiom in my area is "loaded for bear". It generally means to be heavily loaded in a way that's overly prepared, like you are going hunting bears. Typically, when I use it around people who have never heard it, they either ask or just go on like I didn't say it. One day, though, a friend of mine who is gay told me I really shouldn't say things if I don't know what they mean. I clearly know what it means, buuuut, I also know what bear means to him. I explained the idiom, and we both laughed pretty hard as I tried to make him fully and explicitly tell me what he thought it meant to be loaded for his definition of bear. I never did get that explanation.
LMAO that hilarious
Wait, where's the rest of the story?
@@NuncNuncNuncNunc that's the whole thing. Sorry to disappoint. He refuses to discuss it ever since, so I quit bugging him and moved on.
@@RyAnneFultz Guess I'll have to go out and find a bear.
Funny, when asked the story cut off at "tell m..." with no show more. Cheers!
@@NuncNuncNuncNuncOdd. I can see the whole thing. The rest is "what it meant to be loaded for his definition of bear. I never got that explanation."
"is beating around the bush starting to sound worse than usual given the current context? pause"
LMAO 😭😭😭
i'd like you to know i got rid of my bush because i don't like wonder working power
The comment ”Cop a feel” has evoked raucous laughter amongst my friends. At an evening party of mixed friends, a female colleague started sensually rubbing my arm up and down with evil glee. I looked at her and said aloud, “You know, when I put on this angora sweater earlier this evening, I wondered who was going to ‘cop a feel’. Never did I think it was going to be you (a female instead of male.). Just my luck!” Oh… and thanks for the spooky explanation. I wasn’t aware of the derogatory connotation until now.
"cop" is a great word, which I'm convinced is from Yiddish Khap, but etymonline relates, speculatively, to Latin capere.
The Chinese example, or the cases of names like David Lynch or the given name Aryan, go to show how absurd it would be to have to avoid using words that sound like offensive things just because it can prime some people to think of painful things. We can't ask people to have different names or a billion people to say um differently.
IIRC, Iran is cognate with Aryan because the Aryans were the people mention in the Vedas for coming from the north to India. These Aryans were Indo-Europeans and later scholars thought they were the ancestors of all Indo-Europeans while they were in fact the branch that headed south to modern day Iran and India and stuff. When the Nazis talked about Aryans, they meant all Europeans in contrast to the Semic Jews.
@@twipameyer1210Thank you but if I may, you are almost correct. the Aryan people (Iranians) or people of Iran, called themselves that before going to India, and it was Darius the great that referred to himself as of Aryan descent. Also the Nazis meant all Caucasians not just Europeans (excluding Slavs and Jews in Europe for whatever reason - Nazis were a very irrational bunch of very evil people)
I mean there hasn't been a single baby named Adolph Hitler in rather a long time.
@@paultapping9510oh trust me man, Adolf and Hitler (although usually not combined or spelled differently) are at times used as part of names of people especially in South America. It absolutely has not died down and people name their children Adolf and/or Hitler
Arya is a common Javanese name. It would be funny when a White person hear the name
one expression my grandma says is “pulling off your pants to fart” which means something is redundant
My view on all this is that if I become aware that someone is likely to be hurt by something I say or do, then I want to stop doing that thing. It doesn't much matter whether I think they are right to feel offended; there's already more than enough hurt in the world. But by the same token, I think we should try not to take offence where none is intended.
Agreed
"there's already more than enough hurt in the world" - I would argue that complaining about terms like "goatrope" simply because "ropes are involved" is *adding* to the hurt. You're taking away people's joy for using language creatively just because you found a super-tenuous possible path to imagined offense.
@@vacri54 But that, in my opinion, is where the difference between how you treat/respond-to an individual in a 1-on-1 situation vs a system or a broad application comes into play. If I personally choose to reduce my usage of a term or phrase because of how it affects another specific person; that's my own personal choice and it harms no one and adds no hurt to the world. And it's not like I'm "selling out" or anything either, I'll absolutely argue against the other person taking offense in the first place (maybe linguistically if I know enough about the specifics, but definitely at least on a philosophical level), but what I think a lot of people don't realize is that if I backup my argument with good faith actions that prioritize that other person and their feelings; it strengthens my case, not weakens it (so many people go with the "argue about why they shouldn't get offended and then immediately go out of their way to try and offend them as much as possible", which seems to me to imply that they care more about their own smugness than actually being against taking offense).
It is, however, an entirely different thing when it's not an issue of human-to-human interaction. If an authority, organization, or mob-like collective tries to make a sweeping rule against words or phrases in ways that completely ignore context and demonize 'offenders' with no nuance, when there are actually real attempts to take away people's ability to use language creatively for nothing more than exercising control or scoring 'points' for themselves? That's something that I'll pretty much always openly stand against. Basically, "resist authority, but meet people half-way" seems to be a decent rule of thumb in my experience.
@@ICLHStudio This comment sounds nice and all, but really it has no relevance because no one is trying to force you to say goat rope. So the fact that you have some internal dialogue and decide not to is of no consequence unless you are making a normative claim, but you say you are not. Yet you seem to be claiming some superior empathy to those who don't honor absurd requests that limit our means of using our language freely. Like, cool story, don't say the word, but this entire conversation is exclusively about what we SHOULD do, not what you privately decide to do.
If you want to make a normative claim that we should avoid using words that might cause offense even if the offense is unwarranted, because that makes things go smoothly, then make that case. But you seem reluctant to say that because you're worried about offending anyone. You're gonna have to have a conflict some day my guy.
@@saintsalieri ...Okay, I'm honestly trying to understand how you managed to get... almost literally _any_ of that from my comment (did you reply to the wrong comment perhaps? Because very little of what you seem to be saying actually appeared in this chain as far as I can see).
The original comment seemed to be saying something along the lines of: "I don't want to do something that would hurt someone, even if I think they shouldn't be hurt by it in the first place."
The response seemed to be countering with something along the lines of: "By pushing responsibility and guilt for their own hurt onto others, that person is already causing more hurt to the world around them."
And then my reply was aiming for something along the lines of: "But whether or not the offended person is causing hurt is irrelevant to whether we should try to avoid hurting them back; and also that by specifically treating them in good faith, we have a much stronger chance to actually change their mind and reduce the hurt they would be causing with that restrictive stance on language."
So, yeah, not only was my comment quite reasonably relevant to the conversation; but you seem to be making a lot of assumptions and claims about things that "I said" or that the "conversation is about" which are very definitely _not_ the case here.
Love this channel. Makes my masters degree in linguistics feel useful. And since I’m listening to an entertaining guy with a PhD, no need to finish my thesis anymore, I quit :D
I often find that people policing other people’s language have a total lack of self-awareness. I once had a monolingual British guy tell me that I should not use my ownname because it sounds like an ethnic slur in English. That was only the case because HE consistently mispronounced it. I mean, how culturally insensitive can you be while pretending that you are sensitive about people’s feelings!
Oh my God. That’s absolutely hilarious. I for one have absolutely no idea how to pronounce your name. Let alone how to miss pronounce it. And who I might offend in the process.
ngl that guy sounds like an asshole and a bully
Cicero definitely sounds like "CISGENDER" which is a slur (this is an epic joke)
Check out a Japanese UA-camr who makes funny vids about Japanese speaking English. Seems he can make just about any phrase offensive. The power of knowing multiple languages.
What is your name that sounds like a slur??
So, for context, I’m a disabled person (even that word seems to be offensive to some people .. but that’s a whole other discussion about identity vs person, claiming identity, etc etc) and I use a wheelchair.
Words that I really have a problem with are ‘retard’/‘retarded’ and ‘spastic’. The argument I hear most often is that they have a legitimate use in medical context.
‘Spastic’ absolutely does - but only to certain disabilities - so using that *in the appropriate medical context* is fine .. but ‘retard’ is not used in that area any more. So yes, that one hurts because it is only ever used in the modern context to insult. And many people with disabilities have had that levelled against them to degrade and isolate them, which also informs what people think of that person’s mental capacity, even when their disability isn’t in any way related to intellect. (Ask me how many times someone on the phone has said ‘you don’t sound like you have a disability’.)
There was an incident in Australia a few years ago where a shirt with the word ‘retardé’ was printed on a shirt and sold in a retail store. It means ‘to laze around’ in French, but but disability activists protested, and wider society responded by buying all the shirts and confronting the protesters. If I’m honest, I’m not sure which side of that I support, because my language nerd side battles with the side of me that understands why that was triggering.
Side note about ‘spastic’: I know it can be used in America by some people to denote ‘super busy’ and feeling chaotic. I would still argue that there are better words and that we can learn to have good intentions in our speech. As a wheelchair user, I don’t get offended when someone tells me to ‘take a seat’ because it’s such common parlance. Different things offend different people, so responding with empathy when someone tells you they have an issue, and treating people as individuals, is a good way forward, in my opinion.
One time I mentioned the little fairies called "brownies", and a Black coworker got offended. I have *still* never heard that word in a context where it refers to Black people, but I guess it's a thing...?
I think it was a thing in the early 1900s, along with “darkies,” as a “cute” (not cute) infantilizing alternative to the N word.
I had a similar moment where I was telling my (white) dad about all the fairies I was studying and mentioned 'brownies' and 'knockers'. He had choice words about both...
What do they call the little squares of chocolatey goodness?
And please don’t tell them about the British version of the Girl Scouts. Lots of the girls and women in my life were Brownies when they were young.
@MrOtistetrax if you're being serious, then you're a fool. Context matters. The wee folk in question were doing household chores for the main character of the story I was referencing, so my coworker's issue was that it sounded like I was talking about slaves or servants with brown skin. She had simply never heard of the wee folk at all.
@@roiljelly6255 The key there is what happened next. When you explained the confusion, did they stop acting offended? Because how one uses a word is just as important. You were referring to an old concept in folklore and mythology, if they insist on making it into a racial slur, personally I think that says more that they're looking to be offended than that you're actually saying something offensive.
My favorite old timey insult is: “Mollycoddle.”
Apparently, the Laurel and Hardy film "Sons of the Desert" was supposed to be named "Boobs in the woods". Since around that time the meaning of the word "boob" was changing, they went with the former name.
Context: Boob used to mean a foolish person, an idiot. How it got associated with female breasts you'll have to ask a linguist.
i recently read Virginia Woolf’s to the lighthouse and she wrote a few times how much Mrs. Ramsey loved boobies
I'm sure they had a "gay old time"
Idioms also vary from language to language, of course. The French for ‘to call a spade a spade‘ is ‘appeler un chat un chat’ - ‘to call a cat a cat’. Because my cat’s been neutered I have spent far too long trying to crowbar the phrase ‘to call a spayed a spayed’ into conversation. 10:12
"there is a level of individual responsibility for a modicum of mental fortitude that we should all at least strive to possess" 💯
One of my favourite is the korea word for I and you (내가/니가) I can see how that can cause confusion.
This reminds me of the scene from "Back to the Future" (made in 1985, but set mostly in 1955) when a minion of the main villain said to a black musician on a smoke break: "This don't concern you, spook!" To which the musician replied while his fellow musicians got out of their car: "Who are you calling spook, peckerwood!?" I only found out MUCH later that both spook and peckerwood were racial slurs.
Anyway, I don't think most people nowadays associate the word "spooky" with anything racial anymore, even if they might sometimes remember "spook" being used that way.
I think "spook" and "spade" would only be recognized as derogatory terms by well-read or older people. Those are both quite dated and have afaik fallen out of the vernacular.
@@SO-ym3zs Yep, and I didn't even know "spade" was once used as a racial slur before I watched this video.
@@SO-ym3zsI think spade would also be recognised by people (of any age) into race play. I remember from Kat Blaque's video that the flag/symbol for it includes the playing card spade symbol.
@shakirashipslied9721 Fwiw, I've never seen/read it used in a contemporary context in the racial sense, only from sources decades back.
@@SO-ym3zs yeah that checks out. I doubt it'd be commonly used (racially) in non-niche communities.
I'm just checking in to say that I love how much you use Cab Calloway as a data source.
Rather than taboo words, I'm more concerned with words that mean different things to different people. Arguably, the meaning of "decimate" is shifting in actual use, but using it to mean "obliterate" will mis-communicate to those who understand it as "reduce by 10%". And "obliterate" is already a perfectly good word, and there are others to choose from too.
This video is very interesting and touches on something I've been experiencing a little as someone who's recently moved from UK -> Japan to study. Tldr its the "f" word
its a common word found on restaurant menus and shortened to refer to cigarettes. As you said, context matters a lot, but I've noticed other speakers of [international american] english take offence regardless of context (being an exchange its not uncommon to discuss one's favourite home country foods)
I used to work in a place that was bilingual with English and Chinese. Periodically someone not working there would visit and hear me or others use the verbal contraction for 哪一个 (like you mentioned) and would give me a shocked look that I would have to sort out.
It’s very disrespectful to Chinese people that the US is foisting their baggage on them relating to the awful treatment of Black slaves. I think it is cultural colonialism but i can take it down a notch if that is to hysterical. No other language should change nor a professor be fired because your countrymen are sensitive to real injustices by your country’s history unrelated to a 3rd party.
It sounds so different, I don't get it.
@@laceyt5623it doesnt when spoken casually. I'm in China atm and it's always a little funny
This is my first time hearing that "cleft" even has a sexual meaning. The only reason I could think of for someone too be offended about that word is maybe thinking that are making fun of a cleft palate
Same here
How about sporting?
@glensmith491 Can't say I've heard that one either. I guess I have a lot of browsing urban dictionary to do huh
@denimator05 don't know if the urban dictionary is the right place as this use of sport hasn't really been used as such for over a century.
A friend of my parents' mom was from New Zealand. She was at a party with her American husband and tried making smalltalk by asking people if they made a good living. The problem? The New Zealand slang for that at the time was "do you make a good screw?" which means something decidedly different in US culture.
That's one hell of an icebreaker. I wonder how long you could keep the conversation going without anyone figuring it out. "Do you make a good screw?" "my wife and I do alright." "what do you do?" etc.
My standpoint is essentially your own, just even more empathic. Precisely as you said, words change meaning over time and words also change meaning depending on context and co-text. Pragmatics matters an enormous deal. With the phenomenon of _banter_ in particular, even curse words can be endearing; in contrast, just any word can be offensive in a proper context.
90% of the present-day censoring language, in my experience, is really based on unreasonable over-sensitivity and on the authorities behind it not getting (or refusing to admit) these basic facts. It is really getting out of hand and way beyond its original purpose.
It is already happening that so very basic and essential concepts like death or the colour black are getting cancelled linguistically. It's both ridiculous and scary. Death exists. The colour black exists. Neither of them has been designed to be scary or offensive, they existed even before human language was created. Also eating disorders or abuse exist. The German dictator existed too. But cancelling talking about these won't solve the problem. On the contrary, it will only make things worse. People need to talk about these serious issues, and while doing so, they shouldn't be obstructed by thousands of words that must not be uttered.
The only reasonable exception to me are terms specifically coined to be deeply offensive or derogatory from the very beginning and never developed any (stable) other meaning.
Just thinking out loud, I wonder how much this tracks or doesn't track the rise of the internet?
In cyber-space, it's very simple and easy to implement a search for particular strings (see also the "Scunthorpe problem"!). It's very hard to automate something that filters for context. Where censoring of some type is desired, to implement a context-based censoring system would be hugely more resource-intensive than a context-free one.
In meat-space, where an actual human would be in the similar place of assessing language use, it's trivial to filter for context. We instinctively process context anyway, so it'd be no great resource burden to design your censoring rules to be based on context/inferred intent.
Reject English, return to Proto-Germanic.
@@zak3744 I would believe that the internet, and how we use it, is an important factor here. At first, I wasn't sure what OP was talking about regarding death, but then I remembered how TikToks and similar styles of video often say "unalive". This seems more common in captions. Some videos that talk about death a lot may be "bad", i.e. objectionable to advertisers, and thus trip the simple word search filters. Given the amount of user-generated content online now, it would be expensive to always consider context.
In the opposite direction, I've heard that on Tumblr, it is good etiquette to avoid censorship and euphemisms for sensitive topics. This empowers users to filter out what they don't want to see. Black humor can get posted, but I don't have to see it the day after my mom dies.
@@zak3744 I'm all but an expert on the matter, but I would guess that context-ignoring censure is definitely associated with the rise of the internet. Precisely because it is so hard to design a censoring system capable of (correctly) evaluating the context and inferred intent. It is just hard for machines to truly understand pragmatics - hard, or too expensive, or both. Which then gives rise to precisely such desperate, ridiculous coinages as "unalive" instead of "kill".
(Though, as we know from the many anectodal examples, even many people apparently have troubles correctly interpreting the context, which then leads to unfair accusations of racism, slurring, etc. where there very apparently has been no such intention.)
However, in authoritative regimes (present or past), many words or ideas have also been censured mercilessly, regardless of the context, so even if this has become a particularly prevalent phenomenon in the present day, it is far from a new concept.
@@zak3744I assumed that this was about the internet. The only reason I've seen people change their language around death is to avoid algorithmic censorship.
When my family moved from the USA to England there were two expressions we stopped using: "bolloxed up," to mean confused, and "fanny," to mean rear end.
Hah! Yeah, fanny means the same thing here in Australia as in England. It causes considerable laughter here when Americans use it, or even worse 'fanny pack'.
"To crack a book once in a while" - the phrase I never knew I needed
Definitely not nothing offensive, but a funny little example. Short background I'm American, he's British, a low-level celebrity, and a person idol for my career field. After emailing a bit back and forth I asked if I could drop in on him a bit. He and his wife ended up taking me out to dinner. Great night, talked about books, music, work, a bunch of things. Super smart guy. At the end of the night he turns to me and says, "Would you fancy a slug?" I was glad I am vegetarian and..."I don't think so...". When we realized it was the equivalent of having a shot we all had a laugh. And then we talked about the differences in UK/US English.
General ground rule: there’s almost *always* more to any “canceled for using the wrong words” story
so true
Not really. Usually it's just a MAGA saying slurs
You don't know the first thing about politics if you actually believe that. Making mountains out of molehills is the name of the game. It's absurd to believe that everyone is playing fair
@stevie not really. Trump is literally a Hitler-loving fascist
I've literally seen the scenario where a politician used a word in the proper way, but it rhymed with a slur so he was dragged through the mud and had to make a public apology for saying "niggardly", which is unrelated to the slur it sounds like and is a proper part of English. Nothing more to the story than easily offended and poorly educated people making a problem out of a word that rhymes with a slur.
5:24 that’s not just Cab Calloway singing, and not just an animation of Cab Calloway, but those animations are rotoscope, in other words they are drawn over frames of a film of Cab Calloway
I live in Australia and New Zealand, which adds yet another layer of complexity because words sometimes gain differing connotations Downunder to their American, British, etc usages.
Example: the word ‘root’ (noun and, particularly, as a verb) is-or most certainly was post WW2-impolite slang for sexual intercourse. The word’s use by Americans, particularly in relation to sporting or political support, can still provoke snorts or guffaws of laughter to Aussie and Kiwi men(!) of baby boomer or older generations. However, I notice that American cultural imperialism has largely robbed the word among younger generations of those schoolyardish connotations. Such is the life of language.
You can get your kicks on route 66 🎵🎶
I think that you are confusing "root" and "rut" (which, as you say, is pronounced much the same in Aus). Admittedly, these both have multiple meanings. Funnily enough, the other more commonly used meanings of rut could be folded back in to make it sound a dull or unsatisfying shag.
@@jozenthejozarian2564no. Root and rut are pronounced quite differently in Australian English. No confusion mate.
@jozenthejozarian2564 Also Aussie, and I can assure you that he's absolutely correct. Root is used that way here, eg 'get rooted' means precisely the same as 'get f***ed', and there are a number of related phrases and usages.
As an American I will happily have a wild night of unbridled passionate lovemaking with my husband and use sports as an excuse. It sounds a lot more fun than the alternative (having to watch and cheer for sports)
Thanks for getting "Fugue for Tinhorns" stuck in my head 😂
_Epitaph, Valentine, Paul Revere…_
_I got the horse… right… heeeeerrreee!_ 🎵
"How's tricks?" is a phrase I love using, but can't anymore, because everyone under the age of 80 thinks I'm calling them a prostitute. It makes me sad.
What does it mean?
@revangerang It means "what's up" or "how's it going". You hear it in a lot of old movies.
@ cool cool
weird, I'm only in my 20s and I only understand the meaning of "what's up". sounds a bit quirky to me but nothin wrong with that.
Magician erasure
In my nuclear family, when the girls were little, we used to use the word "piddle" for going to the loo quickly. And then came the time when I was properly busting for a piddle and said something like "papa gotta piddle" a couple of times quite quickly. No when I need to hit the head, there is occasionally mention of a certain lake in Mexico. We do enjoy making our own euphemisms that double as in-jokes.
My usual go-to for "Miserly" is "tight", frequentlly expressed as "tight as a gnat's chuff", though I once opined in front of an aged aunt that someone was "tight in every situation", and I later learned that she got the impression that the person was perpetually drunk...
i think the word "tight" in that context usually refers to the money itself, not the person? idk its weird. i could be wrong
@@battleb0ng420 So I'm speaking from a UK perspective, but yes, here indeed it can refer to lack of money (as in "money is a bit tight this month"); but also in the way I mentioned, as in parsimony. I think "tight" in that latter sense might be a contraction of "tightwad"... And yes, it is weird :) These things vary even in our tiny island. I mean, in Scotland, if you're miserly you might get called a "mingebag"!
@@battleb0ng420Money can be tight (scarce), but you can also be tight with your money (not liking to spend it). Related to being a tight-wad.
I am a person that enjoys language, and learning the origin of words. Discussions like this are always attractive and saddening to my ears. I wish that we could all take an extra moment in times like this to explore the perspective of the "offender," to see if we truly believe that they meant to offend, and if not, perhaps just quietly abide. Finally, I am struggling not to put a list of strange ways to say, "Go to the toilet," at the end.
It's pretty common for the phrase "turn into a pumpkin" to come up when I'm chatting online with European friends in different time zones. It also tends to leave them completely bewildered whenever I say it. It's happened to me with at least three different people and I never learn.
Oh my god, someone else who uses that phrase!! The only place I’ve ever heard it is from my grandma, and I use it because she does! Rural Midwest/ US I’m guessing?
This is a common phrase? Is it as common as daily?
“I need to see a man about a horse.”
Now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a long time. …a long time.
Oh no. That's giving racism more power than words. Let the words lose their racism, please.
In middle school I was being harassed and said "she harassed me" to another student. They only heard of it in the sexual context and thought I was lying because she did not inappropriately touch me.
I can't believe you got through the entire video without mentioning shibboleths.
Most of this nonsense isn't coming from a place of hurt, it's a power trip on the part of the person who is almost always not part of the group they claim would be offended. Browbeating someone into using or not using words is a power trip.
CAB CALLOWAY was not White.
Cab Calloway was biracial, and was considered an African-American at the time. He had much lighter skin than most of his cohorts. Look it up
Having empathy makes each of us a better huperson.
Please don't hug or touch me.
Twenty-five years ago, I worked at Wendy's for a month. One day I told my manager I was going to "hit the head". She thought I said someone had hit their head and went into panic mode. I had to quickly intervene and explain the idiom, and I haven't used the phrase since.
I knew one man who used the phrase "shake hands with the Devil" as a euphemism for urination.
I thought that was a euphemism for another thing that involves shaking...
When you reach an advanced age it's called "Shaking hands with the unemployed".
@@ocatwam5890 that's how I'd understand it too.... Given there's no shaking during peeing (imagine how messy that would be)
@@ocatwam5890 I guess OP now knows that the man was really doing at the toilet
@@ocatwam5890it is that other activity. And the other term for that but with the other set of parts I've seen people call "ringing the devil's doorbell".
The phrase that i always found humorous is, "my dogs are barking." Meaning your feet are tired from being on them a long time. You can hear John Candy say it in Plains, Trains, and Automobiles.
I think, as with most things in life, things like this really shouldn't be treated as black-and-white (is that phrase still OK?) but need to be approached with understanding and nuance. I definitely think that there are cases where it is entirely legitimate to ask people to stop using a word, because some words can have a real and serious emotional toll on a significant number of people, and choosing to inflict harm on other people when you don't have to, just for your own convenience (or stubbornness) is, frankly, just being an asshole, and that's not OK.
*However,* the problem in a lot of cases nowadays is that many of these complaints are actually completely disingenuous, and IMHO that's also not OK. They are _not_ made because anybody is _actually_ offended, they are made because people have decided to _pretend_ to be offended as a way for to get publicity, or exert power and control over other people's thoughts and lives. Even among people who knew that "spook" used to have racist connotations in some cases (which I'd bet there are even a fair number of black people who don't know), I would bet that there is almost nobody who actually genuinely was offended by the adjective "spooky", or using it for things like Halloween, without somebody else _telling_ them they should be offended first. The outrage is essentially entirely invented, and not actually genuine at all. And I think that sort of thing really should be called out for the manipulative bullshit it actually is.
prob most of the messages would come from trolls and people who are disingenuous for the purpose of undermining minorities rather then from inside imo
As an ally of the bovine community, I find your use of the term “bullshit” to be highly problematic. There’s nothing false or unreliable about cattle excrement.
I was dating a Colombian woman a few years ago, and I was out meeting her friends. For some reason, when we toasted, I decided to toast with a cutesy thing I learned studying abroad in Germany: Prostietoastie. Because Prost is a toast. Anyway, they thought I shouted PROSTITUTA, and it was problematic.
In high-school, whenever me or my white friends would mention “salt and vinegar chips” one of our brown friends would sarcastically exclaim in feigned horror “omg you can’t say that, ur white!”
Reminds me of the Bo Burnham bit where he had the audience finish his words and then offered "salt and vi...", to which the entire room unknowingly said the rest.
I don't know how that's offensive. And I don't WANT to know. Because salt and vinegar is far too common a chip flavour to avoid saying.
@@Didntwanttomakeauserprobably the "-negar" bit from vinegar, but it has been said by the original commenter that their friend was being sarcastic
The first time a British person asked me if I was "taking the piss" confused me so much
Did he ask you if you wanted a fag?
One that I like (as a probably-should-be-replaced words) is the sewing term, faggotting. Now it’s a bit antiquated, since it’s a stitch done by hand. It allows you to connect two pieces of fabric without them touching each other. The thread that spans the pieces are then tightly bound by the thread before moving on to the next stitch. Again it’s a bit outdated stitch so there isn’t a commonly accepted term as a replacement. Obviously the term makes sense etymologically, but MAN is it an awkward term for historical sewing research.
Either way I agree with your end point. Like if someone tells you that a thing hurts them, it feels easy enough to at least try and be respectful of that. It’s not them censoring you, it’s them making a request. It’s not like they’re duct taping your mouth shut. You gotta work with people, why antagonize them unnecessarily?
I think I'd put the line a step back from that. There's a difference between sharing your reaction to someone else's language use/discussing differences in language use and making a request that they change it. Demands are obviously even more impositional than requests, but even a request polite prioritises your own language use as a standard that other people should align with rather than vice versa.
Brit here. We legitimately have a (for Americans: think of a golf-ball sized meat loaf or several of them; or maybe it could be meat-loaf shaped) a dish called 'faggots' (have it with pease pudding. Pretty tasty). I'm sorry; there is no way around calling it anything else, because it is not a meat loaf. It is what it is. Plus what we call a cigarette would get our faces slapped in the USA as it's a fag. There will always be cultural misunderstandings. But I guess, an American in the UK would have to put up with it; but maybe a Brit in the USA shouldn't use those words even if in an ordinary (to the Brit) context. Americans should leave their 'fanny bags' back home over here (female genitalia here) and talk about bum bags instead. Oh, but wait ...
@@zak3744 Like, making requests is fine, though. I'm a grown adult who can say 'no' if she wants to. Also, "Please don't call me this," is a different request to "Please don't use this word when I'm around," is a different request to "Please never use this word." Just as an example, I've been asked by some usually-older GSM folks not to call them queer, and I'll instantly agree to that; but if they were to ask me to not use it for myself or others who actively prefer queer, I'm going to say no.
(I realise this isn't exactly the point you were making; just adding thoughts.🤷♀)
To a point I agree, but when being offended comes from a lack of education on the part of the listener I feel it is their problem to deal with. If we all edit ourselves to fit the lowest level of understanding we all lose the ability to communicate intelligently.
So yeah, im brasillian and I was traveling in america with some friends. Back at the time the word "miga", a short form for "amiga" (the female word for friend in Portuguese) was popular here. I dont think i need to explain how that caused us some problems 😂
You need to explain it to me - I'm 55 years old and have lived in many different parts of the US, but I have never heard of the term "miga" at all. I can't even find a negative meaning for it with google.
@robgronotte1 oh, it's because it really really sounds like the n word 😅
@robgronotte1 it's because it really really sounds like the n word 😅
I saw a debate on Threads about whether "bullet point" should be eschewed in favor of "focus point" due to violent language despite the word "bullet" in that term has nothing to do with ammunition. There was a surprising amount of agreement, and someone who agreed added that "bloodshot" is another gun reference we should get rid of. THAT one sent me over the edge...
I was going to make an entirely separate video on that. The list I saw that on said we should all say “feed two birds with one scone,” which is so stupid. And also, you can feed way more birds than that
@@languagejones6784 you also probably shouldn't feed any bread/pastry to birds 😅
"Golden era Simpsons quotes live in my head rent free"
You probably would have enjoyed being a guest at our turn-of-the-century family dinners where my siblings and I _Darmok and Jalad'd_ our conversations in Simpson-reference idioglossia, much to the bafflement of everyone else present.
A lot of the time, I think these types of conversations result in the Streisand effect. I’m in my fifties and I grew up in Phoenix. When I was in my twenties, there was a controversy in Mesa (a neighboring town) because there was a place called “Spook Hill” that some community activists wanted to rename because it was offensive. In my mind, “spook” meant only 1 thing, and that was a ghost. I didn’t know about the spy denotation yet either.
Now, I honestly have no idea why Spook Hill was called Spook Hill. Maybe there was a racist origin. But at the time I, along with all my friends, was surprised to find out that spook could be a racial slur. I had never heard it used that way … at least not that I realized. It was actually used in the movie Back to the Future. When Biff’s buddies toss Marty into the trunk, a band member jumps out of the car and one of Biff’s friends says “Hey, beat it spook, this don’t concern you.” I had seen that movie probably 50 times so I had heard the line, but I’d always assumed it was some kind of 50’s insult that you might say to anyone … if you lived in 1955. It never crossed my mind that it was a racial thing.
So it wasn’t until I heard about the Spook Hill controversy that I even realized "spook" could be a racial slur. In other words, it was the activists whining about it all over TV and radio that taught me that particular meaning. And to be honest, I doubt I’ve heard it used that way in the 30 years since, other than an occasional watching of Back to the Future. I think we keep these kinds of things alive by obsessing over them. If you asked your average 15 year old what spook means, I’m guessing the only definition they could give you would be a ghost, and they would think of it as an archaic word at that. And the adjective “spooky” is even one step farther away from the noun, meaning eerie or creepy. Seriously, has anyone ever heard “spooky” used as a racial descriptor? So why should all English speakers stop using it in it's other contexts?
I find phrases like "long time no see" similar. It was definitely originally insulting. However, now it's just English we use without thinking.
For visual communication, see the glove controversy in animation.
Would you consider doing a video on the term "Gypsy"? Apologies if you've done one and I missed it
The folksy phrase I like to bring out when the situation calls for it is "frog strangler," meaning a torrential downpour. I had no idea Werewolf Bar Mitzvah was sung by Donald Glover, but listening again I can totally hear it. I knew he wrote for the show but I never made that connection.
With a little tangential thinking, I am certain that we could taboo every word ever produced. At the extreme, language is akin to cultural appropriation.
What is language if not cultural appropriation perpetuated on a massive scale by children?
Some people get undie-knotted around the word, pedagogy.
How am I supposed to talk about Max Stirner's work in English now?
Fun fact: Stirner wasn't his real last name but he was bullied for his forehead (Stirn) as a kid and got that name back then
I think I've heard "phantasm" used instead, though I might be confusing it with a different term.
By the way, I amuse myself by looking at the beautifully diverse titles on the spines of books on your bookshelves and on your title slate.
I love it! There’s gonna be an entirely new bookcase in shots pretty soon
Just found the channel. Loved it at once. Liked and subscribed by the five minute mark. One suggestion…
Phases, like “the last straw” or the “straw that broke the camel’s back” should not be used.
They are offensive to turtles. (And in one case, camels.)
Thanks for making such a nuanced video.
This video was swell! I don't know why anyone would get sore over the word "spooky." If I'm feeling gay and I hear the word "spooky", it doesn't turn me into a pill or a wet blanket.
Made my day!
Thank you for the Cab Calloway clip and reference. I've always loved his version of St. James Infirmary Blues, but yeah... the ghost has a real "umm..." vibe these days.
I love Cab Calloway!
My maternal grandfather was from the UK. Even though he'd lived in the states since shortly after the War and did his best to blend in, he still used many words and phrases that Americans don't commonly use. I did not know these were things other kids might not understand and as we spent a lot of time as kids at their house, I picked up a random sampling of them from him. So I'd talk about using the loo or say "let's have a butcher's".
As an adult, I lived in the south for a bit and that was a cultural exchange to be sure. Although I think nowadays it might be less so because of how social media has made it so in effect our community is almost always global.
The dumbest example I can recall was a history teacher having us discuss naval history
I was discussing sea shanties, and I was sent to the principal's office for saying FOLK music and SHIP songs because the teacher had a dirty mind and thought I was saying vulgarities
LMAOOOO
Thank you for this video, It was short enough to hole my attention and you spoke in an amusing manner which helped the fact. I don't leave the house so often so I don't have any funny stories to leave in the comments, nor do I want to give you money. But I'll take the 15 minutes of entertainment and keep moving on with meaninglessness. ❤
I guessed that "spook" was offensive to the intelligence community. As in a slur used to describe a CIA agent or something.
The British TV series Spooks (about spies obviously) was renamed to MI5 in the US, for obvious reasons.
@@anglaismoyen It was renamed when shown in Canada as well (for not as obvious reasons?), but now it's back (on Amazon Prime) under the original name, "Spooks".
A spook is a ghost in Dutch.
Ghosts are invisible.
Spies are also supposed to be invisible, in a way of speaking.
So it makes sense to name them after an older English word (borrowed from Dutch) for ghosts.
Would love to see a future video on whether there are ever times you *shouldn't* learn a language - I feel like you would have a very interesting take. I've seen this mainly argued in regards to native languages, where it's a highly emotional ethical dillema of survival of the language vs. more aspects of a culture being stolen and watered down.
Being Australian, the example I'm very familiar with is across the ditch in New Zealand/Aotearoa with the drastic rise in Te Reo Maori in the last 5 years from the very deliberate effort by the NZ government. My friend's NZ family spoke about how they've witnessed themselves, but especially their children start casually using Te Reo words in conversation. So by all means, it's been a hugely successful revival of a language that was at one point dying. And yet, there's a lot of mixed feelings about it. In particular, on a very personal level there was a comment I saw on reddit from a Maori person who spoke about how they weren't necessarily against the language being much more widely spoken, but also grieved the loss of immediate kinship and recognition they once had when hearing Te Reo Maori signified that they were speaking to another Maori person.
Buddy of mine is Cherokee and their take on it is basically summarized as “There aren’t many of our native speakers left and there are very few speakers in general. If you learn it, you help keep it alive.”
I suspect it varies so much person to person, language to language, and culture to culture that there’s no real way to have a singular discussion that doesn’t leave somebody out.