"He gave me a ring, but then he was an asshole."I understood him perfectly. He got what I was trying to say. You did not. I know not why.
Doesn't work.
posted by ctmf at 8:32 PM
You're kidding right?
posted by P.o.B. at 8:34 PM
Years ago when I first set out to write a book about gift-giving and art, I thought it would be useful to figure out how that phrase came into being. The first recorded use turns out to appear in Thomas Hutchinson's 1765 history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the implication being that something odd had happened when the Puritans first met up with Native generosity. ''An Indian gift,'' one footnote reads, ''is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.'' Over two centuries later we still use the phrase, its sense now broadened to refer to anyone who gives a gift with the clear expectation that the recipient should not keep it.The GIft That Keeps On Giving
The experiences that Hutchinson's forebears were trying to name turn out to demonstrate a simple ethic well known in all traditional gift-exchange societies: The recipient of a gift is more its custodian or steward than its owner. ''The gift must always move'' is the old wisdom, meaning that what we have received from others must eventually be passed along again, either the actual gift itself or something of similar value and meaning.
In such commerce lie the beginnings of social life. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once noticed a simple ritual performed in restaurants in the south of France. Two diners, strangers to one another, might be seated at the same table, each with a small carafe of wine. As the meal began, each man would pour his wine into the other's glass. In an economic sense, nothing happens. And yet, simple community has appeared where previously there was none...
That looks like David Cassidy on the keyboard, and this song would be considered racist in todays age of uptight political correctness,posted by taz (staff) at 2:20 AM on January 7, 2012
federalwarhawk 1 month ago
@Federalwarhawk - If the words were "white cracker devil" instead of "indian giver", you might have a different opinion of what constitutes uptight political correctness - LOL.
PecsInDaCity 3 weeks ago
Though was phrenology inherently racist?Yeah, definitely, but using a much more expansive definition of race than the one we use today. Phrenologists would have considered "Celts" a race, for instance. (I think Celts were among those who had low brows, actually. That's how you knew the Irish were stupid.) I have a really hard time taking issue with lowbrow, though, because we're pretty entirely divorced from the original context.
It's possible that there is another set of people in this equation - people who are not of Native American descent but whose objection would be seen as valid - who are not "the usual crowd of point scoring one-up merchants". However, in my experience this set remains an unreal set. Nobody ever actually belongs to it.posted by running order squabble fest at 10:32 AM on January 7, 2012
Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force:And Connington's has "I fear a Greek, even with a gift in his hand". If I'm right, then "Greeks (even) bearing gifts" is actually an early 20th-century phrase - it sounds proverbial, but I have a suspicion that it's one of those phrases that feels older than it is.
Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.
There are three rows of galleries; the first is called the "balcony," the second the "family circle," the third the "amphitheatre." The latter is sometimes jocosely called - from the fact that negro spectators were formerly limited to this gallery - the "nigger heaven," or, Latinised, "coelum Africanum," but in the opera house the democratic connoisseur of music is fain to resort there, despite the cheap price and the ironical name, as being the best place of all to hear the music.One of the most interesting references is one I came across is from 1888 in a short story called "My Experience as an Adventuress." This is a probably-then-shocking tale of a woman on her own and the crazy doings she gets up to:
To my acquaintances of Murray Hill, perhaps the most shocking of my adventures, did they ever know of them, is my theatre-going. I am passionately fond of the drama, and naturally of a class of plays caviare to the average gallery god. When I am invited to the theatre, as sometimes happens, I sit at my ease, as if I never saw any other part of the house than the court end I then occupy. But when I pay my own scot, behold a change. I take just thirty-five cents from what meagre store as I chance to have, and with that go to and fro in the cars, to and from the dusky back door of the theatre in which my chosen Star is shining. Sometimes I sit among ladies of quite as much if not more refinement than I possess, even if they come openly from studios on Fourteenth Street or dressmaking shops on Ninth, while I skulk down from Murray Hill. Sometimes, again, the real genius of the place, the peanut-eating gallery god, is my next neighbor;but in such theatres and at such plays as I choose I never find the god more offensive in his own gallery than beside me in a street-car. Once upon a time I remember that I sat through Booth's Hamlet in a gallery seat - that night a fifty-cent one and therefore not the cheapest in the house. BEside me sat a young couple, evidently small shop-people, decent, orderly, clean. On the other side were a pair of lovers, perhaps a nursemaid and her grocery swain. But just behind me, at twenty-five cents a seat, loomed, like swollen suns in dusky eclipse, two sumptuous, gorgeous, pompous fellow-citizens of African descent! NEver till I saw these opulent creatures, cologned, oiled, ribboned, and starched, did I realize that I had climbed from Murray Hill to a sphere known as Nigger-Heaven!The there's a sort of comic tale from 1894, set in a peanut gallery, that places a black character, Obadiah Shinbone Johnson, and his wife side by side with some Jewish and Irish immigrants. The Jewish man complains that the black couple has tramped on his feet as they went by. They get into an altercation about whether there should be "white trash" in the gallery and whether any colored person can be "respectable," at which point the theatergoers downstairs shout for them to be quiet. Johnson then addresses the whole crowd, saying that he knows how to behave in a theatre, since he sits up there all the time and sees how the white people below generally proceed with their conversations.
To anybody of Native American ancestry who was offended, I heartily apologize. [...]That is, it's postulating a right way and a wrong way to register protest. For PeterMcDermott, valid callouts about a phrase disparaging to Native Americans come from Native Americans. If you are not in that group, then your call-out is liable to be dismissed as point-scoring one-up merchantry. Likewise, when y2karl says:
To the usual crowd of point scoring one-up merchants who would call out their granny for dropping a surreptitious fart, I offer an extended index finger and invite them to swivel on it.
One rule seems to be that a racist is usually that person over there. Who needs to be educated. That one gets to make oneself morally right by making the other person morally wrong is, of course, not at all intentional.He is essentially pre-insulating against criticism - he is saying that anyone who takes a harder line on this than he does is intrinsically suspect, because they are doing it not for a good, honest reason involving actually opposing racism, but to feel good about their own moral rectitude. See also:
This is why I hate racism discussions here, because everyone rushes to be on the side of the angels by wringing their hands and, then, if people don't ring the right bells in the right order, people rush into put words in other people's mouths. Playing gotcha. Because racism is evil, man, and it has to be fought by any means necessary.Note the "wringing hands" there before the campanology/ventriloquism metaphor, and the mocking "man" at the end. Again, taking a firmer line on this than y2karl is not just the sign of a disagreement - it's a warning sign that the person disagreeing with y2karl is not actually opposing racism, but "playing gotcha" - they are point-scoring, you might say. Or one-upping.
Is Indian giver a racist phrase ? It may have begun as one but I would argue that no one uses it with the intent to malign Native Americans and no one thinks that Indians of any ilk are Indian givers. But I would not use it here and my best advice to anyone else would be not to use it either.In this model, we've got two sets of terminologies - terminologies which are clearly racist and have racist intent - in this case, Dirty Jew - and terminologies which could credibly be used without any sense that they had the potential to cause offence - such as "Indian giver" and "gypped" - which are not demonstrably racist pejoratives, although they are possibly pejorative and have some connection with race. Why, just here, we have Y2karl saying:
Like gypped, [Indian giver]'s an old, old expression. I don't think its use necessarily implies conscious intent to demean any ethnic group.posted by running order squabble fest at 11:36 AM on January 8, 2012
And, indeed, I believe it was y2karl who said:And it is a fact that this post loaded the dice --- dirty indian giver is not the equivalent of dirty Jew -- from the gitgo by implying he was using a racial epithet rather than using a proverbial expression that most people understand in its expanded and changed definition without ever thinking of its historical baggage.So... could you point me to the place where he explicitly rejected the thesis "The comparison of "dirty Indian giver" to "dirty Jew" is not a valid comparison, because "Indian giver" is not a demonstrably racist pejorative"? As opposed to, e.g., explicitly stating it in his own words?
No, he was saying dirty Indian giver. It is a proverbial expression, based upon a cultural misunderstanding, that, for most people, means a person who gives a gift and then tries to take it back later.He sees "dirty Indian giver" as manifestly a lower order of problematic speech than "dirty Jew". Given the response to uses of the term in the media cited by zarq - a mild dressing down, essentially - that seems like a reasonable belief. To be specific, "dirty Jew" is in the category of things you should not say at all If someone does say it (it is implied), it would be OK not to extend the benefit of the doubt. "Indian giver" is in the set of things you should not say in front of a Native American. However, if one did, it would be OK - and right - for the benefit of the doubt to be extended. Because it is not demonstrably being used as a racist pejorative. QED.
The thing about proverbs is that they pack a complex thought into a phrase, and human beings, being the way they are, love to scapegoat outsiders upon whom they have projected their dirty baggage. I suspect that in any language, most proverbs describing negative traits usually involve an ethnic group other than the group using the proverb. Does this make proverbs a bad thing ? I don't think this is necessarily so.
That said, we all agree that we would apologize for saying it if we thoughtlessly blurted it out in front of a Native American. But we would hope to be granted the benefit of the doubt that we did not intend it as a slur because that was not our intention.For Y2karl, "Indian giver" sits on a layer of racial offence lower than directly anti-Semitic abuse, and above an invitation to go Dutch. Which seems like a perfectly reasonable place to put it. Specifically, in his model, it's at a level of quote-unquote racism (and this is where you and he appear to differ) where he believes calling it racist is counter-productive, because it leads people to indulge in bad behaviors, and that there should be another term.
I don't think that we would feel an apology would be necessary for saying something like going dutch or beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Everyone here pretty much agrees that racism is a bad thing. Nobody wants to be a racist or to support it. And, as noted before, because we have no word to separate malicious race hatred from insensitive ignorance, no one wants to be accused of racism. I would think that most people here worry about any insensitive ignorance on their part while few here actuallyhave any actual racial animosity. But, in practice, it seems people are far more eager to condemn the perceived unintended racism of other people than to work on their own ignorant presuppostions and unconscious beliefs. Which is not a good thing. Mote, beam, eye and all that.Which brings us neatly back to (4), which is the interesting part.
I don't doubt there are always some people who are at some level playing a form of Gotcha!, but I think the majority of people on MeFi are simply interested in creating as much of a haven from racial prejudice as we reasonably can.Maybe we're not quite there yet, conceptually, but it's better, I think, to assume that people are calling things out because they believe they are worth calling out, or talking about.
Clinically, however, mental retardation is a subtype of intellectual disability, which is a broader concept and includes intellectual deficits that are too mild to properly qualify as mental retardation, too specific (as in specific learning disability), or acquired later in life, through acquired brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases like dementia. Intellectual disabilities may appear at any age. Developmental disability is any disability that is due to problems with growth and development. This term encompasses many congenital medical conditions that have no mental or intellectual components, although it, too, is sometimes used as a euphemism for MR.[3] Because of its specificity and lack of confusion with other conditions, mental retardation is still the term most widely used and recommended for use in professional medical settings, such as formal scientific research and health insurance paperwork.posted by Miko at 7:53 AM on January 10, 2012
I'm not useless," McKellen asserts in my old school hall, "but when you use that word as an insulting adjective, that's what you're saying about me. So please, watch your language. Because if you don't, you mightn't watch your actions…"I think everyone has to make their own decisions - hopefully informed ones - about the messages they are sending when they use "gay" or "retarded" as pejoratives. But to argue that "retarded" no longer has any link to cognitive impairment seems to be something of a reach, in terms both of diagnostic terminology and of common usage - certainly as recently as Tropic Thunder (2008), a key and much-repeated joke relied on the understanding that "go full retard" meant "behave like someone with severe cognitive impairment".
A: I take issue with the use of this phrase.We've already covered this, I think. A does not equal B. B is trying to raise the emotional temperature, and to avoid actually addressing A's concern. This is covered by the link to Jay Smooth, above. Marge Piercey is also often credited with a statement that goes something like this:
B: So, you are calling me a racist? Flame on!
If someone says to you that you said or did something racist, don't leap to the conclusion that they're saying you are outcaste and unclean; think of it instead of them telling you that you have a booger at the end of your nose. Wipe it off, and thank them for letting you know.This is also, I think, relevant to your interests here.
posted by y2karl at 3:37 PM on January 6, 2012 [6 favorites]