(no subject)

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:31 PM -0800 2/8/01, Jerome Foster wrote:
>Re what to call Chinese and Japanse- the current PC term is Asian. Seems it
>was once Asiatic but that lost favor sometime after WWII. Then it was
>Oriental but that went out for some reason though my local supermarket sells
>Oriental food and there is a market that sells only Oriental food run by
Asians who don't seem to object to the term.

When we discussed this in class, several students had the same
story--"Oriental" is offensive for people (for the reason Frank Abate
cited, i.e. that it defines Asians in terms of Europeans) but is fine
for food; we have an "Oriental Pantry" grocery in New Haven that
hasn't seen fit to change its name, but the owners would presumably
object to being called by the same label.  (Of course, as we've
discussed at length, nouns (especially for human categories) are
always touchier than adjectives.  But while "Asian" can serve readily
as an innocuous label for provenance, it doesn't really fill in for
"Asiatic" or "Mongoloid", and deliberately so.  All those traditional
racial categories ("Caucasian", "Negroid", "Mongoloid") are now seen
as misguided as categories, and not just offensive as labels thereof.
(See AHD4's Usage Note under "race".)

larry