The University of Southern California is reeling after removing a business communication professor from the classroom for his pronunciation of a Chinese “filler” word that can sound like “nigger.”
More than 100 of Greg Patton’s former students, most of them Chinese by ethnicity or nationality, accused administrators of “casting insult toward the Chinese language” and compared their action against Patton to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China.
They demanded the punishment of whoever filed the racial discrimination complaint against him in a Sept. 1 letter.
The filler word transliterates as nei ge. This is even worse than the ignorant sorts who freak out over the word "niggardly." 1/28/99 AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) _ David Howard could have used the word ``miserly″ to describe how he administered a Washington, D.C., government fund. Instead, he chose ``niggardly,″ and it cost him his job.
``Niggardly″ means Scrooge-like. But it sounds a lot like a racial slur, and a few of Howard’s colleagues took offense.
Mayor Anthony Williams, who is black, accepted the resignation of Howard, who is white, saying initially that his aide showed poor judgment even though he ``didn’t say anything that was in itself racist.″
The only better example of bowing to ignorance was when a Dallas County official used the term "black hole" to refer to the traffic ticket collection office. A black county commissioner showed how ignorant he is by seeing this as a racial insult, not a reference to the astronomical object (which clearly needs renaming).
There seem to be an awful lot of very ignorant and easily offended people who lack enough knowledge to play in public.
PETA wanted the town of Fishkill, NY to change its name because they believed it promoted violence against fish. But the town got its name from Dutch settlers where the word 'kil' means creek. The town refused to change its name.
ReplyDeleteWill Neige (snow) and Neiger (to snow) be long for this world? Peter Farb, author of "Wordplay - what happens when people talk" told of how in Northern British Columbia the teachers find it difficult to teach English to young First Nation children, in part because the word "such" sounds very much like the local language vulgar word for female body parts. Ignorance is a terrible authority.
ReplyDeleteI'm never accepting the word "Whitewash" again.
ReplyDelete