That's not "PC". It's one thing to be "noun"; it's quite another to be a person who has a characteristic.

If you say "Jenny is an asthmatic" you are describing and defining me solely and exclusively through my disability. If you say "Jenny has asthma" or "Jenny is a person with asthma", you are acknowledging first that I am a human being and merely noting my disability as one of potentially many characteristics.

It sounds tiny and petty. In each individual single instance, it is tiny (though not petty). But if you go through life only ever being defined as a noun - particularly a noun that is sub-humanised by human history - you are made to feel fractionally less human with every instance.

So, it is polite, please, to call me "a person with asthma", not "an asthmatic". And as someone has already mentioned on this thread - please say that "Nie Weiping is Chinese", not "Nie Weiping is a Chinaman".

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My European rating.

No, I missed that.



cdybeijing later explained that cringing about the term, the Orient, was because of its imprecision.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Interesting how the rationales for those who think 'oriental' might have problems vary so much. I admit that this our reactions are very hard to systematize, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily invalid.

I have a hard time seeing the problem with the phrase 'an asthmatic' (I'm a very mild asthmatic), while on the other hand, I cringe at the phrase 'an autist' (I don't think I'm one, but as an obsessive nerd with social oddities and a tendency to rock back and forth, I feel a certain "team spirit"). Is the "an X" rather than "person with X" pattern intrinsically bad? I have no idea.

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Occupy Babel!

I prefer to use the following terms for my fellow Brits across the pond:

Limey
Redcoat
Crumpet-Stuffer
Chinless-Wonder
Wanker

But I guess my personal favorite is: tea-wopping-limey-rooineck-fog-breathing-colonialist-wanker. Yes, it's mouth full but it just slides off the tongue so eloquently. What's the big deal anyway?

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"This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought."
-Jonas Skarssen

1) Saying somebody is 'mysterious' is not derogatory. Many try hard to be viewed as 'mysterious'. I'd say it is a compliment, but its just me... I, for example, am VERY mysterious!!!

2) Hyperpape might have explained why he thinks this or that, but this does not necessarily make it so.

3) About cdybeijing - so we have one person who feels offended (is he/she even Oriental?) and plenty of confirmed Oriental people who do not. If this is a criterion for not using a word, we will run out of words within a week!! In ANY language! You can ALWAYS find one person who feel offended by almost anything you say. Maybe even two people.

<sarcasm>
Personally, I feel offended by you using any of the following words:


Why? I just do!
And somehow, I only feel in this way when YOU say these words.
Each time you use any of these words, I can't help but feel like you're picking on me, and this makes me feel like you discriminate against people who have independent opinions.

So stop using such derogatory words!
Really.
</sarcasm>

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Congratulations on your inability to understand an analogy. I was trying to find something non-controversial and calm.

I will come back when I have time and try to explain further using other, more unpleasant examples, if the idea of extrapolating is really impossible for people.

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My European rating.

I normally agree with you on lots of things, so I'm assuming I'm missing something here rather than the other way round, but this strikes me as odd. Are you trying to say that I should say you are a "person whose gender is female" rather than "a woman"?

I'm a man. I'm British. I'm 28. I'm lots of nouns that I have no objection to people saying I am. I don't feel dehumanised by being lumped in with a pot of other people who share a similarity to me, and I'm not quite sure why I'm supposed to?

No you can't say that. It is: "I'm a human who happens to be male, happens to live in Britian, and happens to be 28 years old."

Ooops! I can't say that. There are other great apes. Let me try again: "You're a primate who happens to be human...

Dang! I must be sensitive to the feelings of other vertebrates. "You are a vertebrate who happents to be a primate, who happens to be a human...

Oh dear! There are invertebrates. I'm gonna quit before I offend a vegatable.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

Damned good question, when you put it like that. Please watch this space while I go away and think about it.

There are two obvious things which spring to mind, at least as long as I consider the latter two of your examples: one is that it's probably only mentioned when it's relevant, which is important in general, and the second is that they are rarely pejorative terms and almost never pejorative terms on a large sociological level. But gender - well, in an ideal world it would only be referred to when relevant, and wouldn't be pejorative anyway, but neither of those things are true and I definitely need to think long and hard about whether there's a difference difference between this and other nouns, or whether in fact the terms have the potential to be a problem.

Thank you for making me think.

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My European rating.

This is a strawman construction based on an argument that I don't think anyone is actually making. Least of all simpkin, if that's the post you're referencing.

The subtlety of language usage being in some way derogatory depends on context and is hard to describe. The use of asthma is perhaps an awkward example too, unless you consider it to bear a stigma for some reason (though it does still make sense, I think).

Simpkin has an excellent point to be made, though, and I think she can elucidate much better than I can with my own vague grasp of what she means. I hope people will not mock a point that they simply haven't understood yet.

Actually, I do understand it. And Topazg evidently does too.

Topaz made the point simply. I made the point facetiously. For the third iteration, I shall try to make the point formally.

Basically, what Simpkin is saying is that to decribe something as category Y when that thing is a member of a larger category X ( such that Y is a subset of X ), is to overemphasize Y and implicitly underemphasize X.
The problem with this is that once it starts, there is no logical stopping point; at most, there is only a practical one. If category X is itself a subset of W, then the same logic would apply, so that one must refer to the thing as "a W which happens to be Y and which happens to be X". Then if there is category V, of which W is a subset, we can go one more step.

Eventually, we will be describing this particular object as "an A, which happens to be a B, which happens to be a C...etc." It only stops when we have a base category A for which we know of no superset. In other words, Topazg is a thing which happens to be normal matter, which happens to be.../many steps snipped/... who happens to be a primate who happens to be human who happens to be male.

As a practical matter, at some point we have to choose an arbitrary base category to encompass the discusion; or to borrow Topazg's wonderfully pithy words, we have to lump things in some pot. One can argue that one does not like the choice of base categories, but one cannot argue that the choice of base categories is improper because a superset exists. This leads to the recursive problem decribed above.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

Actually I think you have missed the point. It comes down to...simpkin is asthmatic, that's fine, nobody cares (or...shouldn't think anything more of it as regards to her as a person). It's to do with the wording that simpkin is *an* asthmatic - where this might imply that this defines her rather than be a quality of her. I hope that this both makes sense and *is* what she meant

I don't really want to make this argument, because I don't think I'm the best qualified, but...would it make more sense to use a race based example? Does 'X is black' have a different connotation to 'X is a black'? Assuming I interpret correctly the point, this is the same type of wordplay which can actually be quite meaningful, and which simpkin was referring to as being dangerous.

EDIT: To elaborate, I suppose the point is that 'X is a black' implies 'X is just a black'. It's dehumanising.

EDIT 2: And to clarify ( ), I'm not saying that this word order is inherently dehumanising, that isn't the point either. But it easily can be used in this way, and often is in our society, which is the important thing to be avoided.

The logical stopping point is stopping where those that you care about have their feelings hurt.

If your friend John doesn't like you to call him Johnny, then if you care about his feelings, don't call him Johnny… Or talk about it with him.

It may be silly - what's wrong with the name Johnny? Nothing's wrong with it to a lot of people. But John doesn't like it.

So you can respect the wishes of those that you care about. Again, if you don't care about it, or if you think John is being unreasonable, that's fine, too. But John may still get upset about it.

In this example, maybe simpkin doesn't like to be called an asthmatic. If you care about her feelings, then don't call her that.

You can only control your own behavior. You cannot control what other people think is good or bad behavior.

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be immersed

Lol.
Each phrase can be dehumanizing or offensive - depending on how it is used.

You can stand in front of me, and I can offer you a cheese sandwich and make it sound dehumanizing... or caring... or kinky (If I happen to like you and you're cute and of appropriate gender)... or indifferent... or angry... or sad... or mysterious... or derogatory... or happy... or whatever.

Still - sometimes a cheese sandwich is just a cheese sandwich.
Don't blame it for the ideas I happen to have at the moment.
Or are you going to start a crusade against cheese sandwiches now?

Back to the topic at hand -
I see very little evidence that the term 'Oriental' is used in a derogatory or dehumanizing way. Sure, it CAN be used like that, as can any word, but from what I can see - it isn't. By trying to make it appear as it if is, you are actually making it so, and thus doing a great disservice to every Oriental person out there.

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- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

As I recall it, the puzzle was over why "coloured person" was inappropriate, while "person of colour" was deemed acceptable. In this version, you can see that there no noun vs. characteristic distinction. In fact, if anything, "person of colour" appears to subordinate the person to the colour class.

I'm not saying that there isn't a difference in how the expressions are perceived - there obviously is. It's just that it is odd that two expressions, so grammatically similar, and whose literal meanings appear to be identical, should elicit such different reactions from people.

Anyways, this is partly an excuse to bring up an old "Bloom County" strip, from 1988(!). Sorry, but I could not find a version in, um, colour:

http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/blm/1988/blm880828.gif

Enjoy.

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And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’ diseases, waked and raged...
- Rudyard Kipling, "The Light That Failed" (1891)

Probably we will have to agree to disagree about this.

You might possibly claim that I made a "sexist" remark about oriental women (I would dispute that), but I was not using the term oriental in a derogatory manner - far from it.

Actually I would be surprised if many were to object to the terms mysterious or exotic.

This is what I said



Certainly there is a sense of mystery associated with the East. Do you not have an image of a snake in a basket and a man "charming" it with music - or the strange sounding musical instruments of Kabuki http://www.creative-arts.net/kabuki/Sound/shamisen.au - I find nothing bad with these associations.

What concerns me more is people who don't like oriental women - or French, or Northumbrian or whatever.

It might be worthwhile to look at the flip side of this.

What if I don't like Johnny. Despite the fact that his friends call him John, I prefer to call him Johnny. It's not a derogatory word. It's just a common alternative to John. I can even claim that there is nothing offensive about me saying "Johnny."

But there is. It is the fact that I, someone who doesn't like him, prefer to use the word. "Johnny" might seem like a normal word, but it's not. Due to my having chosen it, "Johnny" has taken on a negative connotation. This is not implicit in the word itself. It has to do with the context. If instead of me, it was Johnny's friends who all called him Johnny, Johnny might even think that "Johnny" has a certain flair that he likes.

But I got there first, and have managed to taint a neutral word, and can use it hurtfully. This doesn't mean that "Johnny" in and of itself is a bad word, but if you are his friend, and you know that his enemy (me) uses it against him, then it would be silly for you to not take this into account when using the word yourself. This is not to say that the word "Johnny" should be forbidden - in fact, one possibility is to take control of the word yourself - as blacks have with "melanin enhanced gentleman," and gays have with "queer," and mitigate the possibility of that word being used against someone you like.

Words such as "Oriental" don't exist in a vacuum. They acquire nuances depending on who uses them and when. The well wishing idea of political correctness is also an attempt to take control of words. It does so by separating the world into good people who never offend anybody and bad people who callously ignore the sensitivities of others. There are certainly many of us who resist being pressed into such a mold.

Nonetheless, those of us who bear a grudge against word police, but no grudge against orientals should be aware that each word has it's own history, and that the nuances a word acquires have an effect on real people. Just ask Johnny.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Oops. I've managed to provoke our very own language police who have for someone's benefit (mine?) and perhaps humorously, altered my word choice in the above post.

Maybe people aren't ready to read such words, but my use of it was illustrative and not inflammatory, and it seems to me silly to censor it. After all, the words "queer" and "oriental" - also potentially offensive - were left standing. I am aware, as is virtually everybody, that the censored word is strongly associated with a cruel discrimination of black people, and I am also aware of its history. It was derived from Negro the Spanish and Portuguese word for "black." The use of Negro in English to denote a black person first appeared in 1555. The word which I am not allowed to type first appeared in 1587, and was simply a variant pronunciation of negro, and not originally pejorative.

Anyway, nice that we can squeeze another meta-level into this discussion.

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Patience, grasshopper.

It's very illogical. We were supposed to stop using words like small, and replace them with vertically challenged. Also you can't say problems, you have to say issues. This is a very peculiar form of thought control and should be resisted by anyone who believes in freedom.

This is true, I suppose. But 'is a black' alternative to 'is black' is problematic because it's the method of noun usage that *is* used in a dehumanising a great deal. This is what I meant in my EDIT2 - it is easy to think of fake counterexamples, but they don't disprove the point.

I'm not really sure what to say to make you consider my point, most things I think you will just say 'lol' at because you already don't believe me. I hope that simpkin will be able to explain better why this is problematic (and it *is* possible to provide very real examples that illustrate the point, but I'd rather someone with more knowledge about it did so)



This doesn't relate to your previous point. It isn't even a very good exaggeration of your argument from incomprehension.



I never said that Oriental was a derogatory or dehumanizing word to use, don't involve that separate point in the line of debate about the specific word 'Oriental'. This also attempts to devalue my argument via absurdity, but you can only do so by putting words in my mouth.