Counting only to two

Beverly Flanigan flanigan at OHIO.EDU
Thu Apr 19 17:05:45 UTC 2007


There was some early hope that since this guy was "foreign" we could
absolve America of yet another gun crime.  But alas, he turned out to be
just another American kid (hyphenated like all of us) with all too ready
access to guns.

At 12:20 PM 4/19/2007, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: Counting only to two
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>
>On Apr 19, 2007, at 8:32 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> > What I had to say about Gypsies wasn't meant to be funny. The fact of
> > the matter is that stereotypes are all too often extensions of
> > reality. A recent unfortunate example is the shootings at VA Tech. I
> > was deathly afraid that the shooter would turn out to be black. When
> > it became clear that he was *not* some crack-crazed, black street thug
> > who'd lost what was left of his mind after he was finally dumped by
> > the naive, white-liberal, teen coed that he'd been pimping off of, a
> > great weight was lifted from my shoulders.
>
>well, now korean-americans are sweatin' real bad.
>
>one of the things that comes with being in a stigmatized group is
>that Every Individual Stands for the Whole Group.  so when things go
>bad, that just shows what "those people" are like.  to take examples
>from my own world: the gay kid who strikes back at harassers with a
>gun shows that gays are mentally unstable; ditto the gay mass
>murderer, the gay pedophile, etc.  when a well-known gay couple
>breaks up, that shows that gay people can't maintain relationships.
>and so on.  every such event is dismaying to lgbt people.
>
>arnold
>
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