Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

The usage notes on this site for with the transcript of what the professor said: its a filler word, sometimes repeated like English "um, um".

https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/The_fil...

Not sure if this link will always work but here is the instance being referred to: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/zoom_0.mp4?_=1

There have been tons of memes about this exact misunderstanding in SAT for a while...

The first few times I heard it (as a native English speaker) it made my head turn but it's such a commonly used part of Chinese that after hearing it for the thousandth time you stop hearing it as English.

EDIT: After watching the video I have to say that the combination of pronouncing it a bit off and surrounding it with English made it sound pretty bad on the surface, but it definitely didn't sound intentional.

Lmao. I go to school with a lot of mandarin speakers (CU) and it’s fun to see non-Chinese-speaker’s ears perk up when they hear something so close to a racial slur.

I made a joke about this exact scenario years ago.

This word means "uhmm" and you can hear it dozens of times in a single conversation.

It sounds like an English-language racial slur, but you stop being surprised to hear it pretty quickly when living in China. The story isn't loading for me, so I don't know the context, if this was a native Mandarin speaker speaking in Mandarin...

Reminds me of the time someone pointed out that "salut" the french for "hi" sounds like "stupid donkey" in Mandarin (or maybe Shanghainese, I forget).