Asian, Oriental, and other terms of endearment

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 03:20 PM 2/9/2001, "Pearsons, Enid" <epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM> wrote:
>Unless I am reading too hastily, there appears to be an assumption in this
>thread that all older people (i.e., the parents and grandparents mentioned)
>are prejudiced, narrow-minded, socially and linguistically insensitive,
>incapable of change, and ignorant. That has not been my experience. Nor
>would I want to believe that all younger people are smug, arrogant,
>prejudiced, narrow-minded, and prone to generalizing about their elders from
>manifestly limited experience. Let's not exclude ageism from the list of
>attitudes we all want to avoid.
>
>        Enid (who confesses to the occasional Senior Moment)
>

Linguistic changes and their causation, like all other changes and
causations, occur as time goes forward. It wasn't possible for people in
(say) 1930 to change their linguistic usages as a result of their
information about and attitudes toward -- i.e., approval of, disapproval of
-- what people in (say) 1980 were going to do and believe. To the extent
that people in 1980 were changing, or had changed, or wanted to change,
certain usages, that can only have been because of **prior** usage(s) of
which they happened to be aware, which led them to want to make changes in
their own usage(s).

However, it would be a matter of speculation or debate whether people in
1980 were *necessarily* more sophisticated or morally better, either
generally or on average, than those in 1930. Those with a strong interest in
cultural polemics can hash that one out. What is clear is that speakers at a
given date may change their usages because of their ideas about prior
usages, but speakers at an eralier date cannot do that same with regrad to
speakers at a later date.

If nothing else, I do try to keep a firm grip on the obvious!

Your idea above underscores my hypothesis that discussions about which
terms, expressions, and ideas are appropriate and inappropriate tend to
manifest a strong interest in claiming intellectual and moral superiority.
You thought you discerned that in my post (though I was simply trying to
describe things I had noticed over the years about changing linguistic usage
with regard to labels applied to ethnic groups), and I'm not 100% sure that
I don't see it in yours!

Best to all,

Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu