Difference between revisions of "Political Correctness"
(Created page with " A few years ago one of those whiney American females that seems always to get on TV kicked up a row in Australia when she saw a product on sale called an "Eskimo Pie" (that's...") |
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Revision as of 10:08, 18 September 2019
A few years ago one of those whiney American females that seems always to get on TV kicked up a row in Australia when she saw a product on sale called an "Eskimo Pie" (that's a chocolate covered ice cream or choc-ice to the rest of us). The accusation was blatant racism 'coz no one is allowed to use the word any more! Now who decided that? The Native people of the Arctic that we all remember from our childhood books who appeared to live in Igloos and fished through a whole in the ice must now be called "Inuit"--big problem; the Inuit live in Greenland, Canada and Northern Alaska--the people who live in Western Alaska and the Russian Far East who have identical lifestyles, ethnicity and culture are not Inuit, but Yup'ik and that is not a single language, but a group of languages and, apparently they don't mind being called "Eskimo". However, having burnt their kayaks, so to speak, the language nazis have fallen back on "Alaska Natives"--although how that stacks up to the fact that Yup'ik also live on the other side of the Bering Straits and the fact that there are indigenous people in Alaska who are not from the "Eskimo" pool is hard to see.
Language Nazis are also confusing the issue, in Britain the term Asian has come to suggest people of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi, where in the US it usually implies East Asians. In Britain every time a newspaper publishes an article headlined "Asian Rape Gang strikes again" all the Chinese, Malays and Japanese must grit their teeth. The perfectly good word "Oriental" is now a no-no and relegated to 19thC novels--because SOMEONE decided it was "not nice". GET A LIFE!
