I'm not even aware of slurs for Armenians. Or Persians, but I could probably guess at those.
"Band-Aids don't fix bullet holes
You say sorry just for show
You live like that, you live with ghosts."
1: This is Los Angeles, though, and AIMHMHB LA stand-up comedians can work up ten minutes of material based on insulting stereotypes of groups the rest of us have barely heard of. They probably have racial epithets for Sami and Hoklo and Wendish.
It seems like this was part of the thrill/dominance feeling for them
It really is remarkable how many people use the ability to ignore common decency as a way to assert or demonstrate their status.
The HR training the whole firm is about to get should be fun.
3: More that both of those ancestries are are relatively common around Los Angeles.
Like 25% of the pharmacists in my hometown were Persian. Or at least born in Iran.
Late in my first year as a biglaw associate, we had a hostile split -- I only heard rumors about what set it off, but the lead guy in the firm and the managing partner in DC were the leaders of the spin-off firm, which ended up being maybe 8-10% of the total. They asked me to join them, which was pretty flattering, but I didn't take the offer. I stayed in what the departing people thought of as a doomed rump. Which turned out fine, but you never know what alternative futures look like.
Lots of people said unflattering things about everyone involved, including their management styles, but this was before email, so there wasn't the kind of paper trail these assholes in the OP created.
The released emails seem only to be from the leaders, but I bet a whole lot of their colleagues didn't just silently tolerate this, but also went along.
The people starting the new firm have a lot of shit to work out, and the name is just the easiest. Loans, leases, subleases, computers, printers, God knows what else they were buying. If I was starting a new 100+ lawyer firm, I'd be thinking alot about how little real estate I could get away with, but you do have to balance client expectations for some nice space, even if you're only housing half or a third of your lawyers.
7 is reflected in the article too:
Some saw the email release as a self-own for Lewis Brisbois, revealing a culture of bigotry thriving in some corners of the behemoth firm. Many objectionable messages were copied to co-workers, from junior associates to fellow partners.
No one these two worked with had any problem with the way they talked and acted.
On another note, I'm slightly surprised that the LA Times felt the need to asterisk out "Gypsy". It's perfectly acceptable over here as a term for that particular ethnic group: https://www.theguardian.com/world/roma-gypsies-and-travellers
These two were using it wrongly, obviously, because they were using it to refer to all Middle Easterners, but that doesn't make it an ethnic slur, far less one that needs to be asterisked.
7 is reflected in the article too:
Some saw the email release as a self-own for Lewis Brisbois, revealing a culture of bigotry thriving in some corners of the behemoth firm. Many objectionable messages were copied to co-workers, from junior associates to fellow partners.
No one these two worked with had any problem with the way they talked and acted.
On another note, I'm slightly surprised that the LA Times felt the need to asterisk out "Gypsy". It's perfectly acceptable over here as a term for that particular ethnic group: https://www.theguardian.com/world/roma-gypsies-and-travellers
These two were using it wrongly, obviously, because they were using it to refer to all Middle Easterners, but that doesn't make it an ethnic slur, far less one that needs to be asterisked.
I swear I only pressed Post once. I blame Moby's phone, and the Armenians.
10.last: It's used almost entirely as a slur here.
The released emails seem only to be from the leaders, but I bet a whole lot of their colleagues didn't just silently tolerate this, but also went along.
Including almost certainly the remaining partners who made the decision to circulate their emails.
On another note, I'm slightly surprised that the LA Times felt the need to asterisk out "Gypsy".
The LA Times didn't, that was me.
Aren't there now a bunch of people who didn't get hired that can sue the law firm?
I was expecting the new firm was falling apart, and maybe it is, but despite it being named Barber Ranen for those same two partners, it apparently had eight total founders, and it is continuing on under a new name. So there is someone with assets to sue still!
I was thinking the new firm could represent people suing the old firm.
Ideally, a plaintiff attorney would be pointing to their own emails from their former job.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I can assure you that the mental state of the sender of those emails was just deplorable, a completely amoral monster."
I used to belong to the same bar section as Barber and Ranen, and looking through my emails, it appears Ranen once gave a training on "How to Make Employment Liability Insurance Work For You." I guess maxing out your claims immediately upon starting your business is one way to do it.
13, 15, 17, and 19: what is the socially acceptable way to refer to those groups historically? I know of a library which is well known for its collection of work related to the Roma people, and it is still referred to as the "Groome Gypsy Collection."
24: "it's complicated". "GRT" is the bureaucratic way to do it.
In polite conversation in the US, the G-word is now definitely out. Everyone comes to these things at their own pace; a German friend who published on the subject 30 years ago told me even then not to use it. As you see from the title of her book, some people are Roma, some are Sinti, and I suppose many are a combination of the two. https://www.amazon.com/Books-Katrin-Reemtsma/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AKatrin+Reemtsma
I have a friend now with Romani heritage, and she's quite adamant on the subject. And once it's pointed out, you see it everywhere.
Reemstma? Now we know who to ask if we need to borrow a fiver!
The wikipedia entry is fairly comprehensive. And notes the Shahnameh connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people#Shahnameh_legend
27 Sadly, Katrin was murdered by her partner in the late 90s.
"My father was a wandering Armenian...."
29: Good grief, a year after the kidnapping?
Though on the flip side, I've been informed by people doing work with Roma communities in Bulgaria that there is a movement to reclaim "Gypsy" by some Gypsy activists, in a similar vein to reclaiming, say "queer." My guess is it's complicated and like most linguistic terms, the language will keep shifting so long as the respectful term is used by speaker communities that still harbor racist attitudes. You see a similar phenomenon at play with Native American vs. Indian vs. Indigenous etc.
I try to consult Roald Dahl on these matters.
German link: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reemtsma-Entf%C3%BChrung
Her close relative and fellow heir to the immense Reemtsma cigarette fortune was kidnapped in 1996 in one of the most sensational crimes of the postwar era, eventually ransomed for 15 million marks.
"The Brisbois" would be an excellent name for a rock band group of inoffensive, handsome young mohels who can dance while singing in harmony.
We don't just give those out.
"Everyone comes to these things at their own pace; a German friend who published on the subject 30 years ago told me even then not to use it."
It isn't a question of pacing, and that's a mildly patronising thing to say tbh - Gypsy communities here in the UK are happy to have the word used about them, and use it themselves. https://travellermovement.org.uk/gypsy-roma-and-traveller-history-and-culture
Totally throwaway BS comment here but I wonder if part of the thrill in California is that white people there who are racist are more sanctimonious about not being racist than in some other places.
So it's extra transgressive maybe given there is an aspect of California culture where everyone white is throwing out slogans but some of them are using it for cover because they are racist. (Perhaps most aren't too bad but if you aren't from there it really is hard to distinguish the racist ones in certain contexts given how much sloganeering they do.)
They probably did tell themselves it's just a game, that's true. What fools. They deserve what they get.
I love it when racists get busted and their asses get handed to them anyway. The more, the better.
31 Unrelated, obviously.
When I met her, she was an exchange student at Cal. All the other German students -- including my now wife, who was close to Katrin -- knew immediately who she was, but to Americans, the name Reemstma doesn't mean anything. Her childhood had been complicated, and I don't recall ever really talking with her about the cigarette stuff until years later -- I didn't even know until the next year, when I was in Germany for the first time, and there her name was plastered in the windows of every little convenience store. We'd stayed in touch: she tried to come to the US every couple of years (including being maid of honor at our wedding), and she came down to visit when we were at my in-laws. I spoke with her on the phone maybe two months before she was murdered, and she was excited and planning to visit us later that summer.
Gypsy communities here in the UK are happy to have the word used about them, and use it themselves.
One of the byproducts of very different countries sharing a language is that something can be a slur in one but not the other. (Like Eskimo being a slur in Canada but not Alaska.)
39 If some folks are ok with a term that other folks consider a slur -- this is a very common circumstance -- my default still to try to find a different term. I guess I can/should cut Van Morrison a little more slack on this. Since I know people who consider it a slur -- closely enough that if I used it it could get back to one -- it's no skin off my nose to avoid the word.
42: Yes, that parallel did occur to me too.
Right, but given the increasing level of internationalization that situation is largely unsustainable and the tendency is for the taboo to spread. In that particular example, the taboo has spread to some extent from Canada to the US. Or the way that US musicians have stopped using the word "spazz" in lyrics because it's a slur (with a very different meaning!) in the UK.
Yeah, it's interesting that "Eskimo" seems to be becoming less acceptable among younger generations in Alaska. "Inuit" appears to be the preferred term, as in Canada, even though it's not strictly accurate in the same way. It works in practice though because the usual term in Alaska for the more narrowly defined group is "Inupiaq."
So Inuit used in a way that includes Yupik? Or you'd say Inuit-Yupik to include both?
The former. It's still pretty uncommon but that seems to be the most common usage IME.
And how would you then refer to Inuit-without-Yupik?
One weird trend in terms of what's taboo is that I feel like increasingly the word in UNCF is considered a taboo slur (and not just old-fashioned and not preferred), which leads to ridiculous problems when you have any kind of interactions with Spanish (especially in mixed-language settings like international soccer).
Ah, I guess your point is in 46 is that within Alaska you never need to refer to Inuit-without-Yupik because you can say Inupiaq. Useless for linguists, but I guess in practice there's not many situations where you need to make a split between Inuit and Yupik since you either want to refer to the specific tribe or to everyone.
UNCF
That took me a minute, because I first came up with United Nations Children's Fund.
49, 51: Right, for Inuit-without-Yup'ik you would say "Inupiaq," as has long been the case. "Inuit" is from the same language and has the same basic meaning but happens to not be the standard term for the specific group in Alaska, so it's available for the more general one. This ends up in the same place terminologically as Canada, where it's simpler because there are only Inuit.
Okay hmm, not sure of the etiquette of typing this out, but while driving on the freeway I saw a vanity plate that said "I [heart] SQ**W", and it made me wonder if there's a master list of ethnic slurs you can pay to put on a vanity plate in California? (Also: loves to... ski? Worse? More obscure? The government-issued nature of the thing really made it stand out.)
It is trickier for linguists, since "Eskimo" refers to a particular classificatory unit of which "Inupiaq" is one sub-unit. I don't think this usage has changed much yet but it could in theory change in the same way, at the risk of some ambiguity as people get used to the new terminology.
I didn't realize Inuit wasn't standard outside of Canada at this point. I blame my having lived in Canada.
54: They have a list of the categories not allowable, but no list of words, possibly because their reviewers have absolute unappealable authority to decide something is obscene.
I'd very happily bet that 54 is intended to refer to the skiing location.
We were stuck behind a car the other day (in Somerville MA) with the vanity plate BLM. It was a Mercedes that a middle-aged white lady was driving. It also seemed to have a thin blue line flag (not the usual USA one, a simpler one where the line isn't actually that thin). Trolling? Bureau of Land Management? Coincidence and its her initials? It was very strange.
MTG:Arena bans usernames that contain the string "ngr" even in normal words like "angry."
55: I think linguists are moving towards Inuit-Yupik (or Inuit-Yupik-Unangan) for the larger family, but that was just from glancing at Wikipedia arguments at some point and could easily be wrong.
Palisades is too long for a license.
60: Yeah, that seems to be the trend to the extent there is one, but it hasn't caught on much at least in Alaska so far. It does suffer from both inelegance and ambiguity about the levels of subgrouping.
The Alaska Native Language Center seems to have adopted "Inuit-Aleut" at some point recently.
Prob a weird venn diagram for those impacted by NMM rules in last week: Cormac McCarthy, Berlusconi, Pat Robertson, Robert Hanssen, Treat Williams, Kaczynski, and Tina Turner! Oh and Jim Brown.
Yeah I guess that's often dealt with with some kind of suffix (Germanic for the family German for the language), I guess Inuitic-Yupik could work...
63: so what do they call the grouping that's Inuit without Yupik?
Why even bother if there's no Yupik.
That page doesn't seem consistent in terminology between different diagrams, but it looks like they use Inuit-Aleut splitting into Aleut and Inuit-Yupik which splits into Yupik and Inuit?
68: Yeah, this would have been a very recent change so they may not have updated everything consistently. They still have "Eskimo" in various other parts of the website.
I've actually wondered if it might be better to just rename the language family after some other term that's widely shared and doesn't have the baggage of an autonym or exonym. "Nunaic" after the term for "land," say.
54,57 there used to be a twitter account that tweeted rejected license plate applications with the license plate and the reason given for the rejection. I can't find it now but it was often hilarious.
72 California DMV I should have added
73 thanks. Was a shame to lose it when Elon fucked with the API
It's still posting, within the last hour. API cutoff may be expected, but it hasn't happened yet.
64: The news about Cormac McCarthy reminded me of one of my all-time favorite comments.
76 that's not the original account
58
Trolling? Bureau of Land Management? Coincidence and its her initials? It was very strange.
I have no opinion about the license plate you saw, but in 2020 a friend of a friend on Facebook was obsessed with wild horses on federal land and posted a lot about them. Agreed, it was strange.
Hey Barry, what time zone are you in right now?
EST but currently still jet lagged and messed up from the Covid bivalent shot I had yesterday (they never got those in Arrakis). I should be fine in a day or two.
58: Blue Lives Matter seems the simplest explanation.
OT: There is a bunch of gas line work happening near me and there are pieces of plywood covering the holes. They are helpfully marked "hole" except for the one that is "whole".
"US musicians have stopped using the word "spazz" in lyrics because it's a slur (with a very different meaning!) in the UK."
What does it mean in the US?
88: Pretty sure it's no different. Derived from "muscle spasticity," currently implying someone who's kind of flighty/impulisve/excitable (when I was a kid, it was more of a catch-all slang for mental and ohysical disability). "Trump mocks disabled reporter" kind of gives you the sense, although I'd say common use is more like "God, shut up about the Taylor Swift concert. You're such a . . . "
It's definitely a slur here too, with the same meaning. The gen pop just doesn't object to it as much. It gets a very early 2000s "that's so gay" vibe where the people who use it deny the obvious derogatory reference. But it's completely meaningless other than as an implication that someone is having an uncontrolled reaction to something a la spastic cerebral palsy.
There's an AAVE usage as a verb that has diverged from the insult a little more but the origin is the same.
Everyone is talking about the Taylor Swift concert and no one is asking them to shut up. It's like the Kenny Chesney concert except that everyone talks about that because his fans piss in boxes lined with trash bags and leave the boxes in the parking lot.
Well that's the venue's fault. If they were renting out the bags as well as the boxes they should have made that clear.
It was their fault, but not that much their fault. People brought tailgating stuff.
89-91: makes sense. Even here, it wasn't exclusively a slur until fairly recently: the relevant charity was the National Spastics Society until the 1990s. (Now SCOPE.)
Right, "flighty/impulsive/excitable" (plus loud) was the meaning I had in mind, and is literally the only way I've ever heard the word used in my life. And in that context it's not being used as an insult, pretty similar to "flighty" in terms of connotation. Whereas my understanding was that in the UK it played a similar role to the r-word here in terms of being a direct insult and a taboo word. I was not aware that it had ever had the slur connotation here, but I also was homeschooled so missed out on a lot of schoolyard insults. Anyway that's what I meant, and I stand corrected.
98: ah, OK. Yes, in playgrounds in the UK it would be an insult meaning "physically incompetent". The equivalent of "retard" would be "mong", for mongoloid (old term for Down syndrome).
We had a girl with Down Syndrome in my class for a couple of years. In high school, so kids were basically human to her.
It's wild sometime to remember what kids are like. I have a small skin tag on my ear, and it just never comes up in adult life ever, I'll forget I have it for months at a time. But as a kid it was the first topic of conversation with most children. In that case they weren't actually mean about it, more just curious, and I had a whole bit where I could make it turn red that worked great, but it's weird to think about how relevant it was to my daily experience as a kid.
Also, the Bermuda Triangle never comes up now that I'm grown.
The Transformers franchise stopped using the word "slag" as in-universe expletive after they learned the UK valence.
103 is great. But tbf even in UK slang it's pretty outdated - and inasmuch as it's used at all it means "worthless person" as much as "sexually immoral woman, prostitute". When one of Guy Ritchie's stereotypical Cockneys says "LISTEN, YOU SLAGS" it's just a term of general denigration.
98- it's not a compliment, though, right? And all of those traits are characteristic of some types of disabilities, and "spastic" is 100% the origin of the word. So this is what I meant about the "that's so gay" mentality.
I guess I think a purity test for an individual is, would you use this term to describe the flightiness and excitability of someone who actually had spastic cerebral palsy?
But even if you would, because you passed the purity test and in your brain "spaz" has zero connection to disabiilty, that person would likely be angry and deeply offended, because disabled people know the origin of the term and consider it to be a slur, whether or not the ableds agree.
Society also had exactly the same debate with itself about "retard", with holdouts still insisting that it's not about disability at all and OF COURSE they would never say that about someone who was actuaily, you know... like, challenged, or something.
Before the Beyonce controversy I literally didn't know "spastic" was synonymous with cerebral palsy and so wouldn't have known to avoid the "flighty" meaning in that context.
(Now SCOPE.)
I recently heard that the playgrounders now use "scoper" as the modern equivalent insult. Plus ça change!
110- British playgrounders only, obviously.
My sense accords with Upetgi's: as a kid, "spaz" meant "overreacting/freaking out" and I wouldn't have drawn any connection with spastic conditions, nor would I have called anyone a 'spaz' to refer to a disability insultingly. It's not like we were pure in insults. It's just not on the radar the way that 'gay' or 'retard' was for most abled types. I don't doubt you and I don't use the term obviously, but it's plausible to me that Lizzo et al never encountered it as a slur aimed at the disabled.
So, if you knew someone who had cerebral palsy, and they started overreacting and freaking out, you would have felt comfortable saying "ugh stop spazzing out it's fine" or whatever?
I never saw/heard anyone use it directed at any disabled people, but we absolutely knew that it was insulting because it refered to them.
I mean, possibly? I think "freaking out" was the more likely equivalent choice in the idiolect, but it just didn't have anything to do with spastic movement IME. Someone who is spazzing is emotionally unregulated, as I understood it.
Googling around after the controversy though seems like there's a ton of different flavors of what people meant by it, and "spastic" isn't a word I heard as a kid. So I definitely could have put my foot in it, but I knew only one kid with CP and when kids were mean to him they used "retard." Wasn't really in the playground lexicon as an insult.
I get the sense from my two kids that their generation is just straight up nicer about difference. I hope so!
Now I'm wondering whether I grew up with worse assholes (clearly - so many dirtbags) with more creative slurs (probably?) longer ago (I don't think so?) than everyone else. I'm surprised I'm the only one besides E. Messily with a pretty strong sense of this as completely unacceptable and where the word came from (it was the gesture, wasn't it? Yep.). I had more trouble extracting "lame" from my vocabulary because "spazz" was so clearly, well, Trump mocking disabled reporter level of ick.
I recall it from when I was a kid. But haven't heard it in so long I didn't worry about it. "Gay" was so much a slur when I was growing up that I really didn't believe male homosexuality was a thing people identified with as opposed to accused others of until I met people as an adult.
I had a friend in high school (summer math program) with cerebral palsy, he played for the US Paralympic soccer team, which is awesome. He was much less flighty and impulsive and loud than I am, so it wouldn't ever have come up.
I think "you're such a spaz" was more how kids used it when I was growing up. And definitely with the arm movement.
Oh, weird. I think I'd use it as a verb, and the arm movement went with 'retard.' So, not regional variations in assholery, just terminology.
I didn't know either had an arm movement.
My experience as a kid was along Cala's lines: I knew precisely where "retard" and :gay" came from, but "spaz" was just an insult kids used; I don't recall the arm movement.
I could be misremembering, of course, but it's not as if I have the same self-justifying memory for the other slurs.
Context in a transcript from a 2004 webtoon, directed at someone seeming to speak frantically and nonsensically.
I remember 'spaz' being used as a slur as a kid, and also it falling out of use because people (among us kids, not just coming from adults) starting to object to it, similar to use of 'retarded'.
My memory is similar to JRoth's, but I think I've been polluted to exposure to Brit culture and don't entirely trust myself here. Interesting to see how there's no uniformity here, age doesn't seem to matter. Possibly due to pre-internet memetic transfer without transfer of the derivation?
I remember after we got cable tv in town, one guy insulted a rural friend by asking "What's on IHF tonight?:
I'm with ydnew and fa (and EM of course) on this one. I don't recall "spaz" being a common insult when I was a kid but it was definitely known to be derogatory and specifically ableist.
123 is perfect, since "like Strongbad" perfectly captures the usage I'm used to.
Like even after I read about the Beyoncé controversy I thought "oh, they have a different name for cerebral palsy in British English and that's how this came to be the British version of the r-word when it has a totally different meaning in American English." It's just a huge jump from "like Strongbad" to anything even vaguely related to disabilities (except maybe a connection to ADHD).
124 is my memory too. I certainly received the very strong message from friends and parents that no decent human being would use such a mean term -- either toward someone who was 'handicapped'* (because that was being unkind to them about something they couldn't help), or or toward someone who was not disabled (because that was just insult-by-proxy).
The slurs I did actually use as a young person were all gendered -- airhead, ditz, dumb-blonde type things. Internalized misogyny, sigh.
*Now also regarded as a slur, although I have to admit I still sometimes slip and say it with regard to parking spots, though not people.
Also, I think fa and I are the same age, and both older than Teo, so that might track generationally. Although we might have grown up on opposite coasts??
130: I'm the same age as teo, from your side of the state (err, assuming you grew up in your current city, which I don't recall if I have evidence of), but grew up in a more provincial city than you. And my parents were regular users of slurs, so no help there. (As I write this, I'm self-consciously feeling this is such a left-of-center American thing to discuss.)
131: I've been reliable informed they've got it all on UHF.
I think Witt and I are geographically close in terms of where we grew up and age-wise relatively close? As I said in my case it could be mostly being homeschooled. Not sure how that would fit with Cala though.
There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern to this either age-wise or geographically, which is interesting but I don't know what to make of it.
I'm pretty close in age to Witt but grew up in the Bay Area.
I wonder if it's related to proximity/familiarity with disabled kids?
It clearly is a slur and I wouldn't use it myself since I learned what it was referring to as an adult, but I'm another one who used the word as a kid/teen and didn't at that time connect it either to the word "spastic" or to disability. It seems obvious, and was as soon as someone pointed it out to me, but I originally learned and used the word as sort of a freestanding insult.
But obviously I don't know if that's a general regional experience or if I was just super clueless.
138: Oh, that's an interesting hypothesis. I definitely was around disabled kids semi-regularly growing up, in terms of informal and ordinary-life interactions. I didn't start formally volunteering (at what was then called a home for 'crippled' children, which even in the '90s was considered an old-fashioned and ugly term) until I was almost college age.
As one of the clueless ones, I had at least some direct familiarity with kids with disabilities; one very close friend had a cousin with cerebral palsy who he spent a fair amount of time with. But I don't have any recollection one way or the other of either using the word around her or consciously not doing so.
I was a clueless kid growing up first in the sticks and then in a midsized town, and understood it as a slur from whenever I first became aware of it.
I wouldn't say I had any particularly close proximity to disabled kids growing up. There were some around but I didn't know any very well or spend much time with them.
I knew spaz as an insult when I was a kid. Never heard 'gay' used as a slur though, even through high school. There was another slur in more common use.
Elementary school in Texas, HS East Bay.
It feels like an 80s valley girl insult to me, levied in a Revenge of the Nerds type flick at the scrawny hyperactive nerd. I've known the word was problematic for a long time, but was clueless for a longer time before that.
||
Super creepy. The manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue has been selling remains.
|>
The human leather guy was an Eastern Pennsylvanian.
146: this has happened before, in New York - one of the bodysnatchers made $4.6 million from it. It made the headlines over here because one of the bodies was that of a very respected BBC journalist.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/20/usa
He also had a lawyer who didn't exactly exert himself to make his client not sound like a Hammer horror character.
Mastromarino's lawyer, Mario Gallucci, said his client had started out with a legitimate business but had become overwhelmed by the demand for his services. "He decided to cut corners and thus it became an illegal business. If he had not made these changes, instead of looking at him as a monster, we'd probably be looking at him as a pioneer in the industry."
The major employer* in the village in which I grew up was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Scottish_National_Hospital (formerly the "Scottish National Institution for the Education of Imbecile Children"). So I grew up with a lot of exposure to both people with disabilities and the language used around a certain spectrum of disabilities. It was still referred to as the Colony by locals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Scottish_National_Hospital#The_Colony).
My Dad (who was a nurse there are one point) would have used both "spastic" (specifically to mean cerebral palsy and the symptoms of cerebral palsy) and "mongol" (to mean Down's Syndrome) without any pejorative intent, although by the point I was in my teens in the late 80s and started working at the hospital (as a cleaner), "mongol" was very clearly deprecated. Both have been seen as pejorative for a long time, now, of course.
* and the second largest was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellsdyke_Hospital so we were replete with massive Victorian residential hospitals.
148: Alastair Cooke! You almost need a special letter from America to explain that one.
I liked him on Monsterpiece Theater.
At the risk of displaying more ignorance, "mongol" as a schoolyard slur is just British and isn't a word used in American English in our lifetime, right?
Huh, there's a whole language log post about all this, stemming from an earlier controversy about Tiger Woods.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003020.html
I think I've heard "mongoloid" in my teenage years, but said with gusto like it's something recently learned.
Follow ups has a link to this post about Messily's question playing out in reality with someone who had no idea:
http://theinterroblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/it-aint-insult.html?m=1
The Language Log author says:
"For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s (and who, incidentally, is on record as saying that another Bill Murray movie, Caddyshack, is his all-time favorite), the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination."
I read that and considered myself validated for 145.
The other thing that jumped out at me was the grammar of "When it crossed people's minds that I actually was a spastic, they were usually surprised and bit embarrassed by having said something with a sense that they hadn't thought of."
I feel like this may be the origins of the Atlantic divide - the label "a spastic" seems really unfamiliar to me. Spasms, yes. A spastic, no.
In re latest USSC ruling https://twitter.com/ByYourLogic/status/1649560373597708296?s=20
148.last: Sounds like a defense of Burke and Hare.
158 is absolutely what's driving the difference. What I'm less clear on is whether this difference is *caused* by the UK having a "National Spastics Society" (since renamed), or whether the naming of that society *reflected* an already existing difference in how common that term was. But it seems abundantly clear that "spastic" was more common word in the UK than the US in the second half of the 20th century.
Definitely, "spastic" seems like only an adjective to me. Using it as a noun referring to a person is foreign to me. (Spaz, as I would have used it before I found out, could be a noun like that "You're such a spaz", or a verb "I totally spazzed out", but probably not an adjective, which I think would have been "spazzy".)
I remember the phrase "spastic colon." I think from M.A.S.H.
And 155 was "There but for the grace of God go I" for me. I probably wouldn't give someone an insulting nickname based on their personality at all, even though I could see that as a harmless thing to do if you were that kind of friends. But if I did give people nicknames like that, I'm pretty sure that Spaz wouldn't have occurred to me as having specific application to someone with cerebral palsy until I was told specifically -- the only thing that kept me from doing something that egregious was luck.
We discussed a very similar issue some years ago - the Washington Redskins, and the expression "to jew someone down" meaning to bargain with them for a lower price. http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_13075.html
I am doing the debatable thing of sharing my dream here, since I think it reveals a truth about my fears of growing older and inadvertently offending young progressive people.
I dreamed I was hanging out with our housekeeper's 20-something daughter, who I have lightly collaborated with on activist causes before, and who cat-sits for us. (So you can see my guilt about being wealthy and white and having power is already showing up.) In real life, she presents very feminine. But in this instance, I suspected her pronouns might have changed, and so I was keeping my antennae out for any information she cared to share.
After a little bit, she said, "I wanted to tell you - I go by Tesla now."
I inadvertently let out a guffaw, and then quickly shame washed over me, and I scrambled to pave over the moment and demonstrate how quickly I could adapt and act like a qualified progressive adult.
That's the whole thing! It's such a goddamn Fox parody of liberal cringe. My stupid brain. I was glad to wake up.
159 -- Section I of his concurring opinion in today's ICWA case is some compelling reading.
Rejecting the challenges to ICWA is a pleasant surprise, but Kav's concurrence can be taken as a warning. Are there more votes for that than we see here? There's an organized effort to knock this statute down, and they'll try to find the right context to bring the challenge Kav describes.
163: Right, the adjective is "spazzy," and that's really the only version of any of this that was in my vocabulary.
I go by Tesla now.
Is that a way to say "I bought an electric car"?
Of course I know now, but I kind of wonder if you'd told me it was short for something and asked me what it was short for what I would have guessed, certainly wouldn't have come up with "spastic," probably would have guessed "spasm" but I think I would have also considered "space."
152 is correct AFAIK.
I had a similar thought to 138. I don't recall ever knowing/encountering any kids or adults with CP or similar. What I do clearly recall is that mental disability became a (relatively) high profile pop culture thing in the '70s/'80s, with Very Special Episodes doing their best to get American kids to stop being horrible to such kids. I'm pretty sure that's why nobody here has reported being unclear on the r-word.
170: No, it means "I am electric! And also, to a limited extent, self-driving"
Oh yeah, also 154. There were a variety of old timey slurs & insults that came into circulation as kids got older and were exposed to a much more random mix of media. Like, I don't think I ever heard any anti-Italian slurs until I was in HS, not because people were too polite, but because they were mostly passé, at least in my world (my Italian-American college classmate would tell stories about her blue collar father who still had ready facility with anti-Irish slurs, having grown up very much in that ethnic battleground milieu).
174: "I am surprisingly prone to running into things at full speed."
heebie's 145 feels familiar to me, and I think part of why it was uncommon in my teenage milieu is not because it was considered offensive (although it definitely was) but because it felt slightly out-of-date and associated with that Valley-girl '80s style.
177: I can be totalled even in a low-speed collision.
I too am in the parking lot of Bakery Square more often than you might expect.
By their Teslas shall you know them.
176: Right, but then one of them slips through because it's in a phrase and then one day you learn "Wait, paddy wagon is offensive? Wait people used to have that many slurs for Irish people?"
Fortunately most Irish are too drunk to notice when you use slurs against them.
I had a dream that my clarinet caused a rainstorm and then I woke up and closed the window as there was a deluge.
Apparently my Canadian FIL used the word Mongolloid when Tim was a kid, but his not terribly liberal wife made him stop.
When I was a kid, I knew some older people who still told polish jokes.
And speaking of the Supreme Court, they had a Venue Clause case today. The issue wasn't whether you have to have the criminal trial in the district where the crime was committed -- you do -- but whether if you do it in the wrong place and then the conviction gets overturned for that reason, you can have a retrial in the right place. The answer is yes.
Today's third case was about whether the bankruptcy stay which applies to claims from domestic and foreign governments also applies to tribal governments. It does.
185: "Polack" jokes were alive and well in my childhood.
186: I am always glad for SC explainers and updates, even when I don't have much of anything to say in response.