Indian TV news anchor fired after calling Xi Jinping 'Eleven'

[Wilson Gray]

No wonder! No.11 is even lower than the Japanese-American punning insult
for Jews,  "no.10" - "the worst," as you no doubt know - pronounced [dZu:]
in Japanese.

I had to Google "no.10" to be sure. In '60's Los Angeles, the boyz in the
'hood referred to Asian-Americans in general and to the Japanese-Americans
in particular as "Buddha-heads." "[...]-head" in BE isn't *specifically*
meant as an insult, but terms like it, such as  "whiskey-head, wine-head,
coke-head, weed-head, hop-head" have clear negative connotations. But my
Japanese-American friends normally referred to themselves as
"Buddha-heads," as though they saw nothing negative in it all.

Youneverknow.

OTOH, they, in turn, routinely refer(red?) to black people as "colored
people," a term that had been uncool for twenty years amongst the colored
themselves, by that time, but was still used as the standard by non-black
English-speakers all over the world. Spanglish had (has?) it as "colorado,"
which normally meads "red" and, in Dutch, "kleurd" is (was?) the everyday
term, applied even to native Dutch blacks.

OTOH, "un(e) black, une blackette" is quite common in Internet colloquial
French, these days/anymore.

On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 2:06 AM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Indian TV news anchor fired after calling Xi Jinping 'Eleven'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The Guardian:  Newsreader mistakes Chinese president's name for Roman
> numerals following his visit to India to boost economic ties.
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/19/indian-tv-news-anchor-chinese-president-xi-jinping-eleven
> ,
> Friday 19 September 2014 09.52 BST
> WB: I think of him as Mr [z-eye], associating Xi with the fourteenth letter
> of the Greek alphabet. FWIW, the upper-case XI resembles the Chinese
> character for 3. (For Scrabble purposes, best pronounce it lower-case
> [z-eye].)
> BTW, there are five different Chinese surnames romanized as Xi (Wade-Giles
> Hsi).
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_(surname).
>
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>



-- 
-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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