Just a correction on the last blog. Those delicious chocolatey treats known as Minstrels do in fact still exist! Is it hypercorrect to be worrying about this? They're not called minstrels for any other reason than that they are brown, after all... But then you don't see Yorkshire people being offended that our chocolate namesake is a chunky, low quality and sexist product (Yorkie: it's not for girls, apparently).
that is all...
Sunday, 22 February 2009
Monday, 9 February 2009
Polliwogs, Scalliwags and Carol Thatcher
The latest PC furor to hit the press is that Carol Thatcher called a black tennis player a 'golliwog' in the green room of, yes, The One Show!
She refused to apologise properly, brushing the comment off as lighthearted banter and not racist.
This has sparked a whole debate. are golliwogs racist? A golliwog, in case you don't know, is a black rag doll with big red lips and wide eyes. The word is thought to be a combination of Golly and Polliwog (tadpole) with possible play on Scalliwag, so a mischievous, slimy black guy who says golly a lot. Greeeat. It's kind of like a cartoon of a minstrel (Oh. i've just worked out why those chocolates I used to like in the 80s were called Minstrels. And why they don't make them any more...riiiight.) anyway, it's Darkie iconography squared. If you can't get your head around this being offensive, imagine the white equivalent. it would have to be a vivid shade of pink, have lank colourless hair, blue watery eyes, and be called something comparing it to pink marine life and lame white slang. Neatoshrimp, perhaps? Now, imagine that this is the only racial representation of you in your childhood bookshelf as a child. And the book calls you 'a horrid sight'. And then 100 years later, when, as white people, we've fought for equality against huge odds, and now even have a white US president, and everything feels like it might finally be getting cool.... some talentless presenter who's the daughter of a right-wing ex prime minister from hell calls you that. Not cool, Thatcher, not cool.
The thing is, at a time when black people were being segregated, attacked and oppressed, still suffering the aftermath of slavery, A white American-English writer, Florence Kate Upton, wrote a story which taught that although black people might seem unfamiliar and frightening to her young, white, European audience, they were good people and worth making friends with. when the Golliwog first appears in Upton's book, he's presented as kind of scary and ugly only because he's unfamiliar, but later turns out to be a friendly and fun companion to the other toys. her depiction of a blackface minstrel doll having adventures with a pair of (white) wooden dutch dolls can be read as a pretty simplistic allegory of racial equality. It's just that she used an image that we, now, understand to be inherently racist. I'd like to think the Golliwog doll could be reclaimed as a positive Black toy, but it's difficult when the abbreviated form, wog, is an incredibly nasty racial slur for Black and Asian people in Britain. If you aren't from the UK and want to know how bad this is, look up David Oluwale- the inspiration for the play Nationality: Wog.
This is why Carol Thatcer calling ANYONE a Golliwog, even off air, is bad. While the original Golliwog was a naive and inherently racist portrayal of Blackness, but it was done with good intentions, and was right for its time. Over 100 years of not-too-morally-firm-from-white-people's-perspective history later, There is no WAY of not reading it as a slur. Unless the tennis player in question ACTUALLY looks like a jet black rag doll in a minstrel costume. if thaqt's the case, it was a fair comment and she's off the hook. let's see, shall we?
Nope, Carol's just a racist. I blame the parents.
WG
She refused to apologise properly, brushing the comment off as lighthearted banter and not racist.
This has sparked a whole debate. are golliwogs racist? A golliwog, in case you don't know, is a black rag doll with big red lips and wide eyes. The word is thought to be a combination of Golly and Polliwog (tadpole) with possible play on Scalliwag, so a mischievous, slimy black guy who says golly a lot. Greeeat. It's kind of like a cartoon of a minstrel (Oh. i've just worked out why those chocolates I used to like in the 80s were called Minstrels. And why they don't make them any more...riiiight.) anyway, it's Darkie iconography squared. If you can't get your head around this being offensive, imagine the white equivalent. it would have to be a vivid shade of pink, have lank colourless hair, blue watery eyes, and be called something comparing it to pink marine life and lame white slang. Neatoshrimp, perhaps? Now, imagine that this is the only racial representation of you in your childhood bookshelf as a child. And the book calls you 'a horrid sight'. And then 100 years later, when, as white people, we've fought for equality against huge odds, and now even have a white US president, and everything feels like it might finally be getting cool.... some talentless presenter who's the daughter of a right-wing ex prime minister from hell calls you that. Not cool, Thatcher, not cool.
The thing is, at a time when black people were being segregated, attacked and oppressed, still suffering the aftermath of slavery, A white American-English writer, Florence Kate Upton, wrote a story which taught that although black people might seem unfamiliar and frightening to her young, white, European audience, they were good people and worth making friends with. when the Golliwog first appears in Upton's book, he's presented as kind of scary and ugly only because he's unfamiliar, but later turns out to be a friendly and fun companion to the other toys. her depiction of a blackface minstrel doll having adventures with a pair of (white) wooden dutch dolls can be read as a pretty simplistic allegory of racial equality. It's just that she used an image that we, now, understand to be inherently racist. I'd like to think the Golliwog doll could be reclaimed as a positive Black toy, but it's difficult when the abbreviated form, wog, is an incredibly nasty racial slur for Black and Asian people in Britain. If you aren't from the UK and want to know how bad this is, look up David Oluwale- the inspiration for the play Nationality: Wog.
This is why Carol Thatcer calling ANYONE a Golliwog, even off air, is bad. While the original Golliwog was a naive and inherently racist portrayal of Blackness, but it was done with good intentions, and was right for its time. Over 100 years of not-too-morally-firm-from-white-people's-perspective history later, There is no WAY of not reading it as a slur. Unless the tennis player in question ACTUALLY looks like a jet black rag doll in a minstrel costume. if thaqt's the case, it was a fair comment and she's off the hook. let's see, shall we?
Nope, Carol's just a racist. I blame the parents.
WG
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
An unfortunate (or deliberate?) choice of words.
I'm a dirty, dirty lady, it's true, but i can't help noticing a masturbation reference at the end of this ad for thrush treatment. What's the verdict? Deliberate, or all in my grubby little mind?
http://www.canesten.co.uk/latest-ad.htm
Answers on a postcard, or in comments.
WG
http://www.canesten.co.uk/latest-ad.htm
Answers on a postcard, or in comments.
WG
Sunday, 1 February 2009
In praise of fucking swearing.
Once again mindless viewing of prime time TV (it may even have been the One Show again - what's happening to me?) has sparked the latest diatribe.
Apparently we all swear too much and civiliasation is coming to an end as a result. We know this because of the ubiquitous random talking heads in a busy high street segment. "There's too much of it. I don't like hearing it. It's the sign of a limited vocabulary."
Well thank you, Captain Eloquent. Pointing out the deficiencies in the vocabularies of others using one of the biggest clichés of them all, the old. 'People who swear do so because they don't know any other words' tripe. Hey, I used the word 'the' seven times so far.. well eight now. Does that make my vocab limited? Fuck cunt bollocks shit wank twat bastard cock. Is it any more limited now?
Some of the most eloquent voices in recent history have been the sweariest. Bill Hicks, George Carlin? Both famous for two things: 1) Absolutely foul, disgusting language that takes your breath away even when you're expecting it and 2) Some of the most incisive, sensitive and poetic examples of the English language around. Check them out. Their vocabularies were not limited; the minds of people who tried to supress them because of their choices of words were. Severely. Carlin was arrested for indecency after his "Seven Dirty Words" bit was aired on a local New York Radio station in 1973. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices ruled 5-4 that the sketch was "indecent but not obscene," giving the FCC broad leeway to determine what constituted indecency on the airwaves. The Seven Dirty Words bit, as well as being funny, critiques the reasons that certain words are banned from the airwaves. The reaction it got actually changed the law.
Today, I'd say one of the most eloquent writers and performers around is Charlie Brooker, who gave us the glorious new word 'Cunthive'. That's not a limited vocabulary, that's genius. In fact, it's fucking genius.
Billy Connolly described the way Glaswegians use swearing as a form of punctuation, a rhythm which adds momentum and force to the conversation. I think that's pretty valid. Every other word being 'fuck' doesn't mean that the other half of what's being said isn't eloquent. It's just being intensified. It's at worst a dialectal tic, but I don't see anyone sending complaints in about Lloyd Grossman or Johnothan Ross's idiosyncrasies (actually, scratch that last one...) However Gordon Ramsay (not my favourite person admittedly) makes the national news because his latest Kitchen Nightmares show had a "fuck" every 20 seconds (insert porn joke here). Well, no shit, Sherlock. the man is more famous for his love of saying 'fuck' than for his cooking. His last show was called the F-word, for fuck's sake! Complaining because Ramsay swore? That's like complaining that Graham Norton is too Irish and gay (although I'm sure that's been done.) Click the fucking remote over to the One Show if you don't like it. I'm sure you'll get all the vocabulary you can handle there.
WG
Apparently we all swear too much and civiliasation is coming to an end as a result. We know this because of the ubiquitous random talking heads in a busy high street segment. "There's too much of it. I don't like hearing it. It's the sign of a limited vocabulary."
Well thank you, Captain Eloquent. Pointing out the deficiencies in the vocabularies of others using one of the biggest clichés of them all, the old. 'People who swear do so because they don't know any other words' tripe. Hey, I used the word 'the' seven times so far.. well eight now. Does that make my vocab limited? Fuck cunt bollocks shit wank twat bastard cock. Is it any more limited now?
Some of the most eloquent voices in recent history have been the sweariest. Bill Hicks, George Carlin? Both famous for two things: 1) Absolutely foul, disgusting language that takes your breath away even when you're expecting it and 2) Some of the most incisive, sensitive and poetic examples of the English language around. Check them out. Their vocabularies were not limited; the minds of people who tried to supress them because of their choices of words were. Severely. Carlin was arrested for indecency after his "Seven Dirty Words" bit was aired on a local New York Radio station in 1973. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices ruled 5-4 that the sketch was "indecent but not obscene," giving the FCC broad leeway to determine what constituted indecency on the airwaves. The Seven Dirty Words bit, as well as being funny, critiques the reasons that certain words are banned from the airwaves. The reaction it got actually changed the law.
Today, I'd say one of the most eloquent writers and performers around is Charlie Brooker, who gave us the glorious new word 'Cunthive'. That's not a limited vocabulary, that's genius. In fact, it's fucking genius.
Billy Connolly described the way Glaswegians use swearing as a form of punctuation, a rhythm which adds momentum and force to the conversation. I think that's pretty valid. Every other word being 'fuck' doesn't mean that the other half of what's being said isn't eloquent. It's just being intensified. It's at worst a dialectal tic, but I don't see anyone sending complaints in about Lloyd Grossman or Johnothan Ross's idiosyncrasies (actually, scratch that last one...) However Gordon Ramsay (not my favourite person admittedly) makes the national news because his latest Kitchen Nightmares show had a "fuck" every 20 seconds (insert porn joke here). Well, no shit, Sherlock. the man is more famous for his love of saying 'fuck' than for his cooking. His last show was called the F-word, for fuck's sake! Complaining because Ramsay swore? That's like complaining that Graham Norton is too Irish and gay (although I'm sure that's been done.) Click the fucking remote over to the One Show if you don't like it. I'm sure you'll get all the vocabulary you can handle there.
WG
Friday, 30 January 2009
The future's bright. The future's pedantic.
Today I was helping a dyslexic kid in an English lesson. The lesson was on Macbeth and the students were summarising the main plot points on a chart. A kid asked what the verb form of prophecy was. (As in "the witches ________ that Macbeth will be king.") Now, I'm supposed to stick to my own one-to-one student in this lesson but, word geek that I am, I can't resist an opportunity to show off my vocabulary. However, before I could speak, the teacher - a pretty good teacher as it happens, one of the few decent types in this school - answers with 'prophesize' and goes to write it on the board. The cardinal sin as a teaching assistant is undermining the teacher, but I couldn't let this lie. I couldn't do it. In another lesson, maybe, but not English. So I piped up with "No such word!" The kids turn around,interested. "I'm sorry, sir, but the word is prophesy (pronounced prophes-eye). Prophesize isn't a word." Now to the guy's credit, he tried to be kind to the poor deluded woman challenging his omniescent English knowledge. "Well, in the dictionary, it says..." I was up, out of my seat, the poor kid who can neither read nor write much more than his own name was on his own now. I took a look over the teacher's shoulder. I said, like him, as kindly as I could "Wiktionary isn't very reliable. Try the school dictionary." he looked it up again online, this time on Wikipedia. Again, not necessarily right, which you'd think a graduate and qualified teacher would know. I stole a dictionary from a handy kid and proved my point. He was very gracious about it, but looked uncomfortable.
I must have apologised about 10 times for my pedantry and my big mouth, went on about how widespread the misconception was. etc etc. I always feel bad doing this sort of thing, but in the end an English teacher tried to teach a non-existent word. I must have seen 20 spelling and grammar errors taught by teachers in the last month. Given the number of days I didn't work (I'm on supply), that's over one a day. Only a few, where I felt I knew the teacher would be ok with it, did I correct. And even then I felt bad. The ones I left made me feel worse, though. It's like having an unscratched itch.
At the same time I love it when people coin new words. After all, we revere Shakespeare as the ultimate writer and he was always at it. Those ex-colleagues of mine who read this will have probably heard the excellent Roy-ism 'dudify' ('doodify'?) - meaning to make something higher quality/more flashy (more 'dudey' i.e. cool)- usually applied to geography presentations. I still use 'dudify' regularly, there are probably kids all over the city who think it's a real world. But in an English lesson, when a kid ASKS for a word, even when studying the number one English neologist (is that a word? It is now...), well sorry, but the pedant gene kicks in.
WG
I must have apologised about 10 times for my pedantry and my big mouth, went on about how widespread the misconception was. etc etc. I always feel bad doing this sort of thing, but in the end an English teacher tried to teach a non-existent word. I must have seen 20 spelling and grammar errors taught by teachers in the last month. Given the number of days I didn't work (I'm on supply), that's over one a day. Only a few, where I felt I knew the teacher would be ok with it, did I correct. And even then I felt bad. The ones I left made me feel worse, though. It's like having an unscratched itch.
At the same time I love it when people coin new words. After all, we revere Shakespeare as the ultimate writer and he was always at it. Those ex-colleagues of mine who read this will have probably heard the excellent Roy-ism 'dudify' ('doodify'?) - meaning to make something higher quality/more flashy (more 'dudey' i.e. cool)- usually applied to geography presentations. I still use 'dudify' regularly, there are probably kids all over the city who think it's a real world. But in an English lesson, when a kid ASKS for a word, even when studying the number one English neologist (is that a word? It is now...), well sorry, but the pedant gene kicks in.
WG
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
A load of tripe
"You know you've got an image problem when your name has come to mean something worthless or rubbish."
i heard this when I turned on the television this evening and thought that I'd tuned into something about homophobic bullying and the word gay. I actually gotquite excited about my pet grievance making primetime BBC One. But no,it was the woman on the One Show (a show more middle of the road than a dead hedgehog) talking about tripe.
Tripe is apparently cow's stomach. I've never met anyone who's eaten and enjoyed it, but given my predeliction for haggis, I'd probably give it a go. I do have to say, watching Hugh Grant being made to pretend to like the stuff on live TV was well worth the license fee.
However, I'd like to see the word tripe replace the word gay in the under 30s vernacular.
"Yo man, that's well tripe."
"Tripeboy!"
"That's some tripe-assed shit."
but it doesn't need to stop there. What's wrong with a retro slang craze? Bring back ripping, jolly and top-hole! Get teenagers asking 'are you squiffy, blud?'Apart from anything else, it'd give the ASBO generation something in common with their grans.
I'm going to use the word tripe as much as possible. Please do the same.
i heard this when I turned on the television this evening and thought that I'd tuned into something about homophobic bullying and the word gay. I actually gotquite excited about my pet grievance making primetime BBC One. But no,it was the woman on the One Show (a show more middle of the road than a dead hedgehog) talking about tripe.
Tripe is apparently cow's stomach. I've never met anyone who's eaten and enjoyed it, but given my predeliction for haggis, I'd probably give it a go. I do have to say, watching Hugh Grant being made to pretend to like the stuff on live TV was well worth the license fee.
However, I'd like to see the word tripe replace the word gay in the under 30s vernacular.
"Yo man, that's well tripe."
"Tripeboy!"
"That's some tripe-assed shit."
but it doesn't need to stop there. What's wrong with a retro slang craze? Bring back ripping, jolly and top-hole! Get teenagers asking 'are you squiffy, blud?'Apart from anything else, it'd give the ASBO generation something in common with their grans.
I'm going to use the word tripe as much as possible. Please do the same.
Sunday, 25 January 2009
When is an ethnic slur a cool nickname? Thoughts on creative reclaimation.
A kid at a school I was working in asked me if I was Jewish the other day. Fair enough, and he was about 20% right, but the context was that he was trying to find something to ridicule. It was a bit creepy to hear Jewish used with that level of disgust. A lot of Muslim kids I know are raised with an antipathy towards Jews, which i try to counter by pointing out that 'Israeli Government Policy' /= 'Jewish Ethics'. This kid wasn't Muslim though, he just thought it would be risible if someone in the room was Jewish.
Then I wondered if he was Jewish himself and was doing some kind of relcaimatory humour that missed the mark. Would that have made it ok? if the kid had been called Moishe Gubelstein, would I have been as creeped out?
My wife is a Ragu-Jew, AKA a Pizza-Bagel, i.e. a person of Italian/Jewish descent. We enjoy making up similar names for other friends of mixedd heritage, or working out what their kids would be called. A Jewish/Puertorican couple we know are 'Jeruselatino', A chinese lady with a scottish husband I saw on masterchef had actually MADE won ton haggis. this is crying out to be a racial nickname. But the liberal guilt reflex in me leaps up here and says "You can't ascribe some woman you don't even knw a racial nickname! You racist!" My racial heritage is so boring that i can't play the game myself. What would I call it? 'A big pile of bland mashed potato with maybe a latke or two buried very deep in there'? It doesn't work, really.
So does my bland racial heritage exclude me from making racial jokes, is reclaiming by proxy ruled out? I just like playing with words. Being told there is a whole area where it's taboo to do this makes that area all the more attractive. So please, those of you with honest to goodness interesting racial mixes, go out and give yourself a creative nickname. It's fun, and nobody can yell at you for it!
Put them in the comments box! Or is that racist of me to ask? Excuse me. I'll just go and implode now.
Maybe I should have called this blog 'internal struggles with liberal guilt'.
WG
Then I wondered if he was Jewish himself and was doing some kind of relcaimatory humour that missed the mark. Would that have made it ok? if the kid had been called Moishe Gubelstein, would I have been as creeped out?
My wife is a Ragu-Jew, AKA a Pizza-Bagel, i.e. a person of Italian/Jewish descent. We enjoy making up similar names for other friends of mixedd heritage, or working out what their kids would be called. A Jewish/Puertorican couple we know are 'Jeruselatino', A chinese lady with a scottish husband I saw on masterchef had actually MADE won ton haggis. this is crying out to be a racial nickname. But the liberal guilt reflex in me leaps up here and says "You can't ascribe some woman you don't even knw a racial nickname! You racist!" My racial heritage is so boring that i can't play the game myself. What would I call it? 'A big pile of bland mashed potato with maybe a latke or two buried very deep in there'? It doesn't work, really.
So does my bland racial heritage exclude me from making racial jokes, is reclaiming by proxy ruled out? I just like playing with words. Being told there is a whole area where it's taboo to do this makes that area all the more attractive. So please, those of you with honest to goodness interesting racial mixes, go out and give yourself a creative nickname. It's fun, and nobody can yell at you for it!
Put them in the comments box! Or is that racist of me to ask? Excuse me. I'll just go and implode now.
Maybe I should have called this blog 'internal struggles with liberal guilt'.
WG
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