Nit-Picking

Mocking Furriners

From The Englishman, a correction to my New Year’s Eve greetings post for the Brits:

“Please note it wasn’t the “Brits” but only the English who were allowed to party together with their Celtic neighbours who escaped. I hear Bristol was very full last night.”

It took me nearly two decades to stop referring to all inhabitants of the British Isles as “English” or “Englishmen”, and now that I’ve finally got that straight, it appears that I’ve gone and fucked it up again.

Sigh.

9 comments

  1. It’s worse than that. Here in Aberdeen, I understood that the festivities had been cancelled but they went ahead with the firework display anyway! Of course, it was over before I could do much about it.

  2. Yes, it is kind of like how people of Scotland are described. You will be criticized if you use the wrong variation of “Scots”, “Scottish” or “Scotch”.

  4. I’m Irish, (Have lived in England most of my life), Americans in America seem always to think I’m Australian.

  5. I can’t keep up with changing monikers and labels, so I have quit trying.

    For me, as an older chap, it started with “colored”, then “black”, then “African-American and God only knows what’s next. I stopped with black.

    Then, we went from “queer” (when we played Smear the Queer in my Catholic grade school, the queer was the person with the ball whom you tried to tackle, denigrate, etc.) to “gay”, then LGBT, then LGBTQ, then variations (diesel dyke, lipstick lesbian, twink, etc.) and now back to “queer”. I just stuck with “gay” for homosexuals and “freaks” for trannies, trips, traps, non-binary, etc.

    Next, we went from Japs (I grew up in the generation following WWII and we were still highly pissed off about Pearl Harbor and the Asian Theater), then Oriental (which is now a pejorative term), and now Asian.

    And don’t even get me started on the Muzzies.

    1. This reminds me of an old Bloom County cartoon in which one of the characters castigates his mother for saying something about the “cute little colored girl” playing outside. He informs her that the new term is “people of color”.

      Her: People of color?
      Him: Yes; people of color!
      Her: So, colored people.

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