Nigger vs. Colored, et al.

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:50 AM, paul johnson <paulzjoh at mtnhome.com> wrote:
> I'm 76 and both my mother and father's family used 'nigger well into the
> 50's. Â But they were products of Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods. Â Dago,
> wop guinea, sheeny kike, polack mick paddy, bohunk. wooden shoe and on
> and on, were not pejoratives to them they were just adjectives,
> including compliments, as in "one smart_____"
> "That___can really run" Â They seemed to take no offense if somebody used
> the terms on them. Â It was the tone of the semtence, not the content.


Compared to Paul, I am but a tad, of course. ;-) Nevertheless, Paul
makes a valid point. Location, i.e. context, is all. If I were to say
to one of my ace-boon-coons something like,

"Shit, nigger!. You a motherfucker!"

I'd be surprised, if not astounded, were he to take offense.

IME, in the privacy of our homes, we use, among other slurs, "paddy" -
extended to mean any white person, the connection with the Irish
having long since been lost (cf. the work of Smitherman), if such ever
existed in BE - without giving it a second thought. For the longest, I
didn't understand why, upon occasion, Irish-Americans would pitch a
bitch WRT the use of "paddy-wagon." After all, it's only a slangy
readjustment of "patrol-wagon," right? How do the Irish consider it to
have any connection with them? Why is that any reason for the Irish to
get their Irish up? WTF? The colored have pronounced _patroll(er)_ as
"padd[@]-roll(er)" since slavery times. That shwa (I use this spelling
because I can and for no other reason; if the German-style
transliteration is more to your liking, please feel free to imagine
the presence of a "c" in the relevant environment) or even a full
vowel (I have friends both black and sansei who use "dildy" for
"dildo") > [I] > [i] is unremarkable.

I personally am not a friend of P.C., especially when "jackass is
reduced to "jack[bleep]", whereas the pronunciation, "BUH-Tock(s),"
originally meant as a joke, is regarded as standard. *That* is what
deserves to be bleeped. I've never been able to understand why Richard
Pryor came to feel that he had to stop using "nigger." (In public, at
least.) I'm with Dave Chappelle: use the shit out of "nigger" and
apply it to anyone of any background, just as "guy," originally a term
of opprobrium for Catholic Englishmen, after Guy Fawkes, is now
applied to anyone, even to women, of whatever background.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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