Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
ISTM he substituted it for the 'w' - word which even then was considered offensive.
Ed Do you like your cheese?
- Thread starter arthwollipot
- Start date
ISTM he substituted it for the 'w' - word which even then was considered offensive.
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
Historically it originates as a racial slur in the early 1800s and was popularised in a blackface minstrel song and character in the 1820s.
This is starting to get confusing. I don't even know an offensive "w" word. Unless you mean pulling your own chain if you know what I mean
angrysoba
Philosophile
Seriously? It is also a common racial slur in Australia but usually aimed at a different demographic to who it is/was aimed at in the UK.
No he didn't, the character used "wog" as well. Coon and Wog were pretty much interchangeable back then, both used as racial pejoratives.
(For our Australian folk: I think "wog" has a different meaning these days for you lot, but it has only ever been used as a pejorative/insult in the UK.)
For non-UK folk or younger UK folk, this is a playlist on Youtube that has clips from some very popular TV shows from the 60s and 70s and it shows the language that was deemed acceptable to use on broadcast TV. I doubt the clips are going to be safe for work for the vast majority of folk so please be careful where you watch them.
Clip 5 is titled "I don't like wogs" and is being used by the character Albert Steptoe, since the clip is in black and white we can date it to pre-Alf Garnet so it shows the word was being used in very popular mainstream television.
Note: at the time if a character used a non-racial profanity such as say "piss" or the s-word in these shows it would have had society in an uproar. E.g.
In 1965 - so contemporaneous to the "I don't like wogs" clip someone used the f-word on a late night discussion show and this is what happened:
It just shows how acceptable racism was in "polite" company back then.
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He used both.
“Wog” and “dago” were pejorative terms for Greek and Italian immigrants to Australia and later extended to other Eastern Europeans. It was reclaimed by ethnic comedians from about the 1970s with TV shows like “Wogs out of work”.
I don’t think it has ever been used in Australian to describe indigenous or black immigrants.
Aah. I do know it, but just have never heard of it for decades
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
Not banned. Contextualised with an introduction that also warns the viewer that racist language is used in the episode.
Why I said "wanted" and not "had"
Give it a generation and.
A) people just won't think those shows are funny or worth watching. I mean Alf Garnett is just tedious, even for me.
B) the new bad words will just go their way. I literally have not heard anyone say wog, gollywogs, or dago since I was a little kid.
Even then it was only on TV.
The English language boots out dim words.
Or we would still be saying "thou", "come hither" and "per chance" and ****
Hlafordlaes
Disorder of Kilopi
The reality is that word meanings are solely tied to current usage in a given population of native speakers, and their semantic mappings drift over time. Any word or name can suffer an "ignoble fate" in common usage, entirely irrespectively of its origin, traditional dictionary definition, commercial use, or possibly noble past in literature.
It's one major reason why dictionaries have new editions.
Simply put, reality entirely refutes your effort to impute.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
It was bred to hunt racoons. It's a ra-Coon Hound.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
You lost me right there at the start...
Red Baron Farms
Philosopher
OFC a coon hound was bred to hunt raccoons. And when the hounds were instead used to hunt down human beings like animals, "coon hunting" has a whole new racist meaning.
There is nothing inherently racist about the word coon or racoon either one. It becomes racist only when used to call a fellow human being a name that degrades his dignity and compares him to a pest animal.
Roughly equivalent to calling someone a pig, except in the South they really did hunt down human beings like animals and treated them badly when caught.
So it is worse than just name calling. It was name calling with a very real threat of violence. The worst sort of racism.
To bring it back to the thread topic.... No, Coon cheese is not racist. It has nothing to do with either raccoons, runaway slaves, hunting humans, calling humans names of pest animals, threatening or doing violence to other humans, or anything else racist at all. And the term itself is not inherently racist either.
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Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
What does it even mean to say a word is “inherently racist.” Some sort of essentialist take on words and meanings?
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
It means that a word is racist regardless of what context it is used in.
For example, you can't say "The 'n-word' is racist and you should never use it".
For example, you can't say "The 'n-word' is racist and you should never use it".
Edited by Agatha:
Edited for rule 10. For this word only we allow the construction 'n-word' where it is necessary (such as in discussing etymology) but the autocensor advice does not change; in the public sections, spell out swear words in full and correctly and allow the autocensor to catch them.
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Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
Is there meaning without context? Surely there is no essential or inherent meaning.
One of Aboriginal activist Stephen Hagan’s other campaigns was over the E. S. "******" Brown Stand at a QLD rugby ground. As we have seen with the word coon, supporters argued for a contextual meaning that wasn’t racist. In this case it was the nickname of a lauded rugby player. The word it’s isn’t racist in its etymology. It is so because of its use towards black slaves.
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