Re: Self-Use of Ethnic Insults (was: Re: Ebonic Christmas )

At 23:49 -0500 15.1.2000, Steg Belsky wrote:
>
>Don't worry about it :-)  The more you, me, and everyone else uses the
>word "jew" instead of "jewish person" (it's so much shorter, anyway!) the
>more normal it'll sound.  For some reason it just sounds somewhat
>shocking, as if it was not-quite-polite or something.
As a vocative it definitely does, but then I think that being addressed as
"Hey <nationality> | <"race"> | <religious affiliation> would sound
shocking/not-quite-polite to most people -- if used by an "outsider".  I
definitely don't stir if a guy in a wheelchair addresses me with "Hey,
cripple", but if someone "abled" did.

(BTW, remember the scene where Woody Allen complains over someone saying
"d'you" after every second sentence? :-)

>I had a Torah
>teacher freshie-year in highschool who specifically addressed the class
>as "jews!" for a vocative, *in English* even though the class was
>conducted in Hebrew, for the specific purpose of getting us used to the
>sound of it.  The Hebrew word _yehudim_ sounds completely value-neutral.
But that's insider use!

BTW it occurred to me today that the fact that _Schikse_ means 'whore' in
German slang suggests a somewhat tarnished usage of the word among Yiddish
speakers in bygone times...  Or am I wrong that the Hebrew etymon of the
word (dang! where *is* that German etymological dictionary?) was originally
value-neutral, just as was _barbaros_ in Greek, or at least more so than
what it has become.

>My friends in college probably use "jew" for the same reason, although
>more *for* it's shock value than to purposely diminish it's shock value.
>You get people's attention better that way.  Someone might have noticed
>that in my posts on Jûdajca i switched constantly back and forth between
>"Jews" and "Judeans" - the second noun, like "Swedes" or "Buddhists", is
>completely value-neutral.
"Buddhist" is hardly value neutral to Buddhists, or to non-Buddhist
fundamentalists of various descriptions.

As one of the Tibetan Lamas I've met liked to say (when people treated him
very deferentially): "Come on, I'm not a very special person.  Let's all be
buddies together!"  ("Buddies" and "Buddhist(s)" are usually homonyms in
Tibetan-accented English :-)



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
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