Heard on TV

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Sep 5, 2011, at 9:05 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 10:56 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> There are some people who think--for whatever reason--that "Jew" is an
>> insult.
>
> Unfortunately, there are reasons for thinking that.

A Jewish friend of mine had to tell me about four or five years ago that it was acceptable. (So I also asked him about Heeb.)

And I had to be told that deaf, deafie and blind are all fine as well, though my  concern about deaf and blind were not as strong as for Jew and deafie.

If you're not a part of a community or don't have close access to it, you simply do not have a way of knowing. Dictionaries are more helpful these days and we now have Wikipedia, but it is not possible to be aware of what each community considers to be acceptable.

For goodness sake, I learned in school about the Lapps in Finland in the 1970s. It took a coincidental meeting with a Sami in a bar in San Jose in the 1990s to set me straight on that score, and there just aren't enough Sami in English-speaking countries to inform everyone!

Aloha from Maui
Benjamin Barrett

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