You're an ethnic slur!
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Apr 10 21:57:22 UTC 2012
On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> Surely influenced by "to call (someone) a name" or "to call (someone) names."
We colored phrase it as,
"call someone out of his name"
IME, this *almost always* means
"call someone a nigger"
I.e., it's usually - but not necessarily; a child involved in a
schoolyard fight might claim that it began when "he called me out of
my name!": called him a "punk" or a "sissy" or some such - used in
describing an unpleasant encounter with the Other Group.
--
-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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