Political Correctness in Russia

[Dustin Hosseini]

Perhaps PC has a role in Russia, but in other ways... that is, it exists in
certain spheres while it is nonexistent in other areas.    

For example, you couldn't, without being offensive, say someone is 'tolstiy'
[fat] but you could perhaps say that someone is 'polniy' or 'pol'nenkiy'
[lit. chubby/plump?].  

In terms of race, IMHO, whereas America and Americans (and perhaps all
Anglophone nations) are quite hung up on this topic – that is, they are
afraid of offending others (i.e. think of the following words: black,
African-American, negro, hyphenated-American, etc.) Russians seem to be
unconcerned with the topic of race – especially within one's own social
group. I should say that, Russians, in general, tend to be less concerned
with causing offense.  

Just a few examples.. Of course Russians do use words such as 'chechency'
'dagestancy', 'abkhazcy' and so forth, but more often than not, in my
opinion, there are far more rude words, rather a plethora of words that
describe people from the Caucasian lands.  The majority of these words are
more offensive than not: 'ponaexavshie' [a word used for anyone who's just
arrived off the train into Moscow], 'chernomaz' [blackface], khach [roughly
equivalent to the English word 'n....r']...  The list goes on.  

It should be noted, many of these words are used within one's own group of
friends/acquaintances, and aren't often used in normal social contexts.  It
isn't that they are being PC, rather they do not want or need extra problems.  

Just my thoughts.  

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