The Canadians and the political correct.
I aways fought the idea that some words should be banned so that people from minorities would not be offended by them. My reason is simple and straight forward, words do not offend, their meanings do. Sure every word has a "natural" meaning, but the context can aways makes them have other meanings. For instance if I use the word "nigger" here, it has only the status of a sample word and should not, or at least I hope it will not, offend anyone.
But the US has created the practice of the political correct, so if we are to refer to a person that is not as high as the other people we should use "small person", witch sound a little bit like an euphemism to me. But at least the Americans seem to take comfort that people are not using the words that were used historically in the name of the prejudice. So you wont be hearing about "dwarfs", "niggers" anywhere.
My thought was that those classifications were in fact solidifying the bad meaning of the words and making it all much worst. But who am I to talk about it? I am white, and am not a Jew, in fact I am an atheist but came from a Catholic background, I am also heterosexual, I also am part of the mean class, and even though I am a Latin American I do come from Brazil, witch people seem to like better then other latin american coutries, but I do also pass an European if I keep my mouth shut :-) . So I cannot say that I have suffered any prejudice at all.
But what do the Canadians have with all this talk about polical correctness? And why am I talking about words and meanings? Keep reading...
So there is the political correctness and some words are forbidden and new words were forged to mean what others would mean, without being offensive. All is good in the world. Well I aways had predicted that the new words would take the offensive rant of the racist people, that would not change their mind just because they had started to use a new word. So it has aways being my opinion that all those political correctness would be an attempt to makeover the problem. The racism will keep existing, but at least we will not see it in day to day affairs.
Sure enough the racists of the US started to adapt to the new ways of the political correctness. So instead of using the "N" word, as many people refer to the dreaded word, they found a new one. So racist people in the US started to use the word "Canadian" in the same meaning as the dreaded "N" word. So much like the "dread pirate Roberts" that resurrects as new person every time the older pirate Roberts needs a rest, the "Canadian" word is assuming the identity of the older and forced retired word and it seem that it is not a new use, some comments in the boing boing thread about the subject seem to point that this has been happening for at least 10 years.
I think this is a bad news, much worst than I ever thought. The new meaning of the word "Canadian" will not be easily banned. I don't think that they will like to be called "person from Canada" instead of the usual "Canadian", just because some racist scum started using that word to hurt and offend people.
- National post article about the new use of the term "Canadian"
- Boing Boing thread about the article.