toyota downgraded

You just gave me a marketing idea! Where should I send the royalty checks?

I knew someone would look for me...

Great, just what we need - another slur

Natalie

"Wickeddoll?" trolled:

A wayward oriental gentleman.

cordially, as always,

rm

Wow a formal organization in honor of Ray?

:-)

Natalie

Dang! I'm totally amazed. I never heard the term "wog" before. Lemme say I'm a white feller like yourself, Geoff, and I think we can all learn a lot from you.

Let's see, Dictionary.com defines "wog" as:

"a disparaging term for a person of color, especially a person from northern Africa or western or southern Asia."

So I guess wog must cover Arabs, Indians, and folks like Thais and Indonesians. How about Chinese? Or is China not far enough south in Asia, according to the definition?

Are there any other special racist words you can teach us, because the American educational system, I'm sorry to say, is sorely deficient in that department. If we just spent more money on the schools.

I've often thought dogs don't accord me enough respect either. They're

always barking at me, like I'm some second class citizen. Me! A second class citizen! Damn dogs.

What do you propose we can do about the dogs? Aren't they the most bothersome non-white folks?

I gotta stop this sarcasm, now, before I expulse. You know, Geoff, I thought I might see something like this in an IRC chat room, but I'm really amazed to see it in a newsgroup like alt.autos.toyota.

Dude, hate just hurts the hater in the end. Good luck making friends.

Built_Well trolled:

This is not true. "Wog" is a British invention, created during their time colonizing India. It is a derogative term for a "wayward oriental gentleman", not "worthy oriental gentleman" as the dictionaries suggest.

Nope. Just East Indians.

The Americans look at wogs differently. Americans call wogs that wear turbans, pull-starts. And they call wogs with dots on their foreheads, push-starts. Finally, they call wogs with no distinguishing characteristics, kick-starts. Anything to get them to work.

Your hate is another countries love.

cordially, as always,

rm

hehehe

Seriously, though, I'm sorry I asked. That is a pretty icky term, anyway you look at it, really.

Natalie

LOL! Some fellow people of Asian descent take offense to the term "oriental" and want to be referred to as Asians or Asian-Americans, so I suppose they might take double offense to being referred to as a wog. Personally, I was not aware that wog was a disparaging term for specific races and just thought it was just another British term for lowlifes in general. When people ask me where I'm from and I tell them I'm from the north side of Chicago, they think I'm being a smart**s instead of just being truthful.

: There used to be a Puerto Rican guy at my company who had Jesus : decals on his headlights -- the idea being, I suppose, that dual : images o'Jesus would be projected ahead of his car and protect him : from harm.

To the Republican National Committee.

Geoff

You need to get out more.

You'd truly be amazed. Astounded, even.

"The wogs begin at Calais," the saying goes. ("Going west," my French friend Francois once retorted. Not bad.) So it obiously includes anyone who isn't British.

Words aren't racist. Racism is a belief in the superiority of some races versus others. Words, being tools for communication, are morally neutral. Having an education allows one to make distinctions of this sort -- distinctions which are lost on the thick-headed and the dull.

Words can be disparaging depending on how they're used. But someone's merely mentioning a word offers precious little insight into what's in his mind.

Shoot 'em. There's a real problem with barking dogs in my neighborhood. I'd like to get out my rifle and make their heads disappear in puffs of red mist, right in mid-bark.

"Expulse?" Yow. That makes me picture somebody ejaculating his brains out through the top of his head. (Kinda gives a whole new meaning to the term "f*****ad," dudnit?)

The fact that you'd even admit to experience with IRC chat rooms says far worse things about you than my patently tongue-in-cheek use of an archaic, Victorian-era term of dis- paragement does about me, I'm afraid.

Cripes. If you'd been a Roman emperor, you'd have been known as Sanctimonious Rex.

Geoff

I'm skeptical about that. It reminds me of the belief that the word "posh" originally stood for "port outbound, starboard home."

BWAHAHAHAHA!

That's insensitive...

Seriously, we all need to lighten the f*ck up about race. I don't hate anybody, but I'm seriously fed up with all this priggishness and sanctimony and PC bullshit.

Geoff

Oh, come now. Between its non-specificity and its being an archaic (and veddy British) relic of the Victorian era, it lost its sting long ago. Nobody uses it seriously anymore.

Geoff

That's true, and it makes no sense.

"Oriental" is more specific than "Asian." An Asian could be a Turk, an Israeli, an Indian or Pakistani, an Afghan, a citizen of one of the former Soviet Central Asian repub- lics, etc. But "Oriental" narrows it down to peoples of specific racial and geographical origins. Since all this touchiness over what people want to be called is about ethnic pride, isn't a more-specific term superior to a less-specific one?

"B-but," some object, "'Oriental' means 'from the east,' and that's insulting because it's from the European per- spective!"

Why would that make it insulting? People have been des- cribing the world in terms of themselves and their own location all throughout history. It's hard to beat "the Middle Kingdom" and "the land Of the Rising Sun" for ethnocentrism, it seems to me. Physician, heal thyself!

Besides, if the concepts of "east" and "west" are objec- tionable because they're based on a reference line running through Greenwich, England, does that mean that these people have rejected the concept of longitude? Somehow I doubt it. Why would the idea be any less objectionable if the Prime Meridian were moved to, say, Beijing?

Geoff

I have no idea why "Oriental" is now offensive. My observation is that first and some seccond generatiion people from eastern Asia refer to themselves as "Oriental," but 3rd and later generations refer to themselves as Asians.

I'm with you there. Since Iraq, Iran, Israel, and part of Turkey are in Asia, are their citizens referred to as Asians instead of Middle Easterners?

whoever drew the map gets to call the shots ;-)

My take on it is that as identity politics and the politics of grievance gained popularity in the late Eighties and early Nineties as part of the larger PC phenomenon, Asian-American university students felt left out. Their race had always been described as the Model Minority thanks to being so successful, but it was suddenly hip to be a victim, and they wanted onto that bandwagon, too.

They had to reach a bit to find something to bitch about, since they could hardly claim to be oppressed. So finding some pretext to take offense at the name by which they'd always been known was the best they were able to come up with.

Geoff

Your take is probably right on the money.

"Ray O" ...

Yeah, I know - rugs are Oriental, people are Asian - but I couldn't resist jabbing you a little..

I love that 'where are you from' crap - about like white supremacists telling me to go back to Africa, when I've never been there.

:-P

Natalie

OK, THAT was a good one.

ROFL!

Natalie