OK, true life experience. I used to have a large number of friends who were either gay or bi. Some of them wanted to learn dancing, but weren't happy that they'd have to go to a dance class where men had to dance with women and vice versa. So I persuaded a dance teacher to offer a class just for this particular group of people, which he did. He was really careful not to say anything un-PC, and to talk about the "leader" and the "follower" instead of the "man" and the "woman". So ...
Right at the end of the class, after he had been so careful with everything, one big butch woman put up her hand and said "So, teacher, when's the next poofters' class going to be?". The look on his face was worth going a long way to see.
I was staying in Vancouver BC around the time of their city's Pride week, and my wife and I happen to like a particular hotel that's in the "gay district", so while we were there we saw lots of gay and lesbian couples on the street (way more than normal). Anyway, I was kinda surprised at how many other people on the street were so shocked to see, eg, two women holding hands.
They were like pointing it out and talking about it, out loud.
I was at a friend's party once and she was telling us about how she and her husband were out partying one night, and she got real liquored up and just for fun...
@DavidWallace yeah, that's what I assume. But point it out to your own group, discreetly, if you must, and discuss it quietly, if you can't contain yourself.
I'm talking, they were walking down the street, and this lesbian couple crosses over to our side and starts walking in the same direction, only, about 15 feet ahead of them, and they're like "AW! THAT'S SO CUTE!!!" And I'm thinking "I think they can hear you"
At least, this looked to me like a romantic couple, not a platonic couple. I admit: I noticed it too. As David said, gay PDAs are not EVERYWHERE. But I didn't shout about it.
@MrShinyandNew安宇 Yeah, those are the kind of people who innocently ask anybody at a party "are you gay?", because they thing all kinds of discretion have become obsolete. But at least they are well meaning.
@KitFox The thing is, while it's not strange for people in general to step outside their normal sexual boundaries, it might be strange for the woman in your story. So I can see why she might find that worth mentioning.
And I can't really defend it, except that I'm using 3rd-party software to replace nearly every function that the OS is supposed to carry out, including the dialler.
My college-age son and his friends use the terms "retarded" and "gay" pretty much interchangeably to mean substandard, bad, lame (in the sense of ineffectual or weak) or just plain wrong. I've suggested that he might want to be careful about where he uses such language, but he clearly isn't worri...
I worked in a place where the supervisor was a lesbian. Around these parts, it's not uncommon to use "queer" in the "unusual" sense. One day, at lunch, one of the other ladies said something like "That's just so queer." I turned to the supervisor and said "She means 'queer' like 'odd' not 'homosexual.'"
I mean, I might refer to oranges as gay if I were making a joke about being fruity. But I'd want that joke to be clear so that people wouldn't misunderstand me.
My Jewish colleague from work (also an atheist) complained about some yarmulka-wearing Jews we saw on our way to lunch one day. He said they were too "Jewy." At first I thought he said "chewy" and was trying to put that sentence together, but he repeated it for effect.
Actually, one man I know told my wife that he was going to have a "Maori roast" for dinner. She asked me afterwards what it meant. She was a bit shocked when I told her it means "fish and chips" - I think she lost a lot of respect for that particular man after that.
@Cerberus Well, maybe these words will continue to be used this way, but I think in English there is a good chance that they will disappear as the current generation faces up to the remaining homophobia in our society, and tries to teach their children good values.
@Robusto Agreed; the only way in which it could be worrying is for gay children to hear these words being used that way. They can't put them into perspective yet.
@Cerberus True. But I think even kids can understand the difference between swear words that are taboo for the sake of taboo and words that are potentially very offensive to people.
@Cerberus In this case, my wife thought she knew what he meant. She seriously thought he was going to dig a hangi, and she didn't realise that this takes hours.
In America before the civil rights movement, especially in the South, the air was full of terms like "nigger," "nigrah," "colored," "coon," "spearchucker," "jungle-bunny" and so on. The only one you hear now is "nigger" and you mostly only hear black people use it.
hey @Cerberus, if you came to WMT in your capacity as an officer and explained to that guy in faction chat why we don't accept applicants who don't have good defense decks, that would be mighty white of you, kthx
@Cerberus It was like an email ."I ordered a black swingset from Fisher Price and this is what they set me." And the attachment was a picture of a lynched black man (swinging from a rope).
@MrShinyandNew安宇 Sure, you can try. My parents forbade me to use all kinds of words, like swear words and non-U words; but I actually kept using most swear words even after I was told not to.
Now, here's an oddity. The Cajuns in Louisiana are called "coon-ass" by just about everyone down there. I remember seeing a sign on a restaurant advertising "Real coon-ass home cookin'!"
@Robusto I had a friend looking to buy a house down South. The local store clerk said it was a nice neighborhood, with the right kind of folks living there.
@Vitaly An author who appeared on The Daily Show last night just wrote a book about Putin. She thinks he is definitely going to win this election, but his days are definitely numbered as Russia's leader. What's your take?
But it would never have occurred to me that the terms "white coffee" and "black coffee" (meaning with or without milk) are not universal. I would have committed the same faux pas.
@KitFox I had a guy come to my house to give me an estimate on some yard work, he does work in the neighbourhood. He said he liked working this neighbourhood because it wasn't so ethnic, knowwhatimean? I was like "welp, thanks for coming out, bye."
The brand of bread that I normally buy is quite a cheap one. A few years ago, I got harassed in a supermarket by a man who told me that I shouldn't buy that brand of bread, because it's not a good brand, and it's the one that all the Islanders buy.
@Robusto It's hard to say exactly what's going to happen without being in the higher echelons of the government, but I'm seeing two possibilities: 1) they're going to let someone else win just to show that the elections are “fair” 2) Putin wins and his days aren't numbered because the electorate is too passive anyway
So when I was in college down in the South, I worked as a temp in an office for a while. I loved my boss, who was a black woman and the lead secretary in the office. One day, I did something that involved touching her hair. I can't remember what now, picking some lint off or some innocent thing, and she rounds on me "Girl! Don't you know better than to touch a black woman's hair?" I was quite taken aback.
"No," I replied, "You're the first black person I've ever met." She stared at me for must have been a full minute then busted out laughing so hard I'm surprised she could breathe. Then she told the other secretaries and called her friends and told them, laughing the whole time.
He told her that he was sick and tired of foreigners coming to NZ and trying to live with their own cultures, rather than adopting NZ culture; and that if Indians (and others) wanted to live in Indian culture, they should have stayed at home.
@DavidWallace I saw something similar on a city bus here in Toronto. This older guy (not THAT old) wanted a seat and nobody got up, so he starts yelling at this poor asian woman and telling her that she and people like her are what's wrong with this country. I tried to intervene but was so shocked that I came off a bit lame, but fortunately there was someone else there who tore into the guy and eventually the whole bus booed this guy until he got off.
When I was in my 20s I visited Augusta, Georgia, with my girlfriend of the time (her family lived there). We visited with her sister, who was living with a professor at the university there. He related a story of how he had written a mild letter to the Augusta paper concerning this or that issue — and then started getting hate mail addressed to "Jew Goldberg" and worse.
When I was 4 at kindergarten, my mother asked me what the name of "the Indian girl who just started at your kindy" was. I hadn't noticed any Indian girl. Skin colour just escaped me completely.
So one day my wife and daughter are on a bus, and this black guy walks on. And my daughter, who was maybe 3yo, is not great at modulating her voice. And she says "Mommy, is that a monkey!?"
@KitFox of all the places for that to happen. It couldn't have been some black guy 200 feet away at a noisy shopping centre. Had to be on a crowded bus.
The best thing to do is probably to first explain to your child for all to hear that, no, she is entirely mistaken, that is a black man, just like daddy, and it's not nice to call people monkey. Then maybe apologize to the black guy, or smile apologetically.
One of the first books my parents gave me to read was a children's encyclopaedia. There was a page called "people from around the world", that had maybe 50 or so people depicted on it, each in a different national costume, each labelled with the country and a typical name from that country. Needless to say, there was enough racial variety that I never thought of "white" as the "normal colour for people to be".
But I mean, anyone who spends time around small kids (has spent time with small kids, and remembers it) will know that small kids say ANYTHING that pops into their heads.
@Cerberus Er, they do. But I, as a parent, wouldn't assume that about a random kid saying something embarrassing. I'd assume that the kid had that thought entirely on their own.
So it is not entirely unreasonable for the black guy to be suspicious. Especially if he has no idea of how children's brains work, how easy it is for children to make that connection.
@Cerberus Yes, precisely. But he'd be wrong, and I think he'd be wrong about just about all the kids who say things that are "racially insensitive". At least, all the 3 year olds.
@Cerberus talking after them, i suppose? i realized some things they were saying at home weren't intended to be said in public, and also realized i could get away with doing that thanks to being a relatively small kid, so i had my fun copying what they were saying at home on purpose and pretending i didn't know it shouldn't have been publicly said
@KitFox I think you'd do just fine with a daughter. I didn't know what I'd do with a daughter either. Then when my son was born I didn't know what to do with a boy. Turns out it's pretty easy either way.
I even remember that my grandmother sometimes spoke French in her nursing home when she didn't want the nurses to understand, but she was already fairly senile, so she didn't understand any more that it wasn't a great idea to use the name of the nurse in the sentence when she was right there.
@KitFox i don't know about that. children who develop faster than average have a very strong tendency to flatline past about the age of, say, 17. it's very hard to learn that there are more difficult things when you are always above your peers and you don't even need to study per se to be the best at your school
@Vitaly Except I would have told you to stop thinking of school as a place where teachers instructed you, then handed you a copy of The Prince for study and practice.
I think they weren't time-consuming enough for me. The year that I competed was the first year that NZ had sent a team. So it was kind of a trial run; we didn't really have much of a training programme set up. I helped to change that later.
But considering the nature of the competition, we should have been pushed harder.
It's weird. I last saw Terry Tao when he was 12. It's easy for me to imagine him with a Fields Medal. It's harder for me to imagine him as anything other than a little kid.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…