Another tempest in a teapot: someone says a word that is considered an ''ethnic slur''. Of course, the fact that Marion Barry, Washington, D.C. politician and ex-convict, said it is enough to make it newsworthy.
The headline is 'I Misspoke When I Said Polack.'
Has anybody ever been excused for using 'racial slurs' on the grounds that they misspoke?
The first comment at AmRen is from a lady who says she is Polish, and refers to Barry's words as a 'nasty comment.'
Here's my problem though, which perhaps some Polish-speaker can clear up for me. Is not the word 'Polack' the Polish word for a Pole? I've been informed previously that it is. So I checked with Google Translate, and lo and behold, the word 'Pole' translates as 'Polak.'
Unless I'm mistaken the same word is the standard term in other Slavic languages.
Sure, it's fun to call the professional victims 'racists' when they themselves utter a word that's perceived as a slur, but to me, it makes the Polish-American complainers, in this case, look foolish if they don't know the language of their own ancestors.
Personally I'd like to see all this politically correct linguistic game-playing end. It's especially unbecoming when practiced by White people.
And even if someone claims that 'well, it's perceived as a slur nowadays by Polish-Americans' or 'the intent is to demean Poles' or whatever, I still don't see the need to make it a PC crime.
The word 'cracker' is now perceived by many if not most Southron people as an insult, as this page explains, though it originally meant simply the English-descended or Anglo-American settlers of Florida.
The way things are going, the very term 'Southerner' or 'Southern' to describe a person will soon be considered a slur, as the people so described are being villainized.
However, I don't think Poles or Polacks are negatively stereotyped in this country, despite the silly 'Polish jokes' that made the rounds some decades ago. When I was in England some years ago, the same jokes were told about the Irish.
And admit it: every ethnic group probably tells jokes about other nationalities, and sometimes the jokes are harmless. Slang terms to describe other nationalities are ubiquitous and nobody need be 'hurt' by them unless there is true animosity behind them -- as is not the case with the P-word.
The word 'cracker', however, is not quite so benign, considering the sentiments behind it these days.
