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Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#351

Post by Natsu »

galimaufry wrote: post #321
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have said this before and will continue to say this: to put an end to this, liberals in the United States need to openly repudiate identity politics progressivism and cancel culture. Former-President Obama has ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca... ); we should too. Please speak up and, more importantly, please vote for old-school liberals instead of progressives.

Politics isn't going to solve this. You could elect an anti-PC theorist like Donald Trump, or an old school liberal like Nancy Pelosi, and this sort of thing would keep happening. The real solution is just awareness. As people see more examples of this sort of thing going wrong they will be more careful about it.

I wish I believed that, but it seems more like a prisoner's dilemma. People get turned by making their self-interest the opposite of the group's interests after being individually targeted with high-pressure tactics.

Anyone who thinks this is all purely organic hasn't been paying much attention.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#352

Post by dathinab »

Warning: I'm not sure how to formulate that properly, I hope no-one gets offended to much.

I think one of the worst thinks you can do is to be afraid of a word itself. But that's exactly where it has come to. It often seems that just pronouncing the n* word or spelling it out is highly offensive.

But IMHO this is super bad for the people who are offended.

If there is a problem you should speak about it and this include pronouncing and spelling the offensive word.

If you don't you are only helping the people which use that word as a insult and a denouncement. You are now at risk of feeling offended or even threatend from just hearing the word even if it's not directed at you , not used as the insult and maybe you misheard (like above).

Demonizing a word when it's the contextual usage of the word which is the problem isn't really helping anyone I believe.

Don't get me wrong using the word to insult, denounce or describe an person is an absolute no-go and as far as I can tell should stay that way.

But when you speak about e.g. how someone breached that no-go and how that is not ok you shouldn't be afraid to use that word instead.

And yes I'm not using the word here because I know how people can be offended by it.

Still fear the abuse of words but don't fear words itself or the fear might just eat you up.

(Abuse as n* originally only described someone from Nigeria, like Berlin => BerlinER with some shortening. But yes this doesn't matter anymore at all and might sometimes even be used to downplay the insult which is not ok.)

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#353

Post by asddubs »

valuearb wrote: post #339

I once said in a senior staff meeting that we shouldn’t be niggardly with employee benefits. A disturbing quiet dropped over the room and I realized a half dozen white men and women were staring at me, while uncomfortably not making eye contact with our African American Business Development director. The CEO rebuked me saying that was not the type of language I should be using. The Director of Business Development th…

To be honest, when I hear someone use that word, I do assume it's primarily in service of saying something that sounds like the n-word with plausible deniability. It'd be something else if it was a commonly used word

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#354

Post by [deleted] »

salex89 wrote: post #92
s3r3nity wrote: post #12

Just wait until they figure out what the word for the color "black" is in Spanish...

For laughs, there is a hundred year old Hungarian/Serbian hard candy called Negro. The author's name was Pietro Negro, and the candy is charcoal black because of liquorice and doped with menthol, which gives it a distinctive medicine taste. People love it or hate it, I love it personally. In the meantime, more flavours are developed in Serbia, with eucalyptus, peppermint, lime, caramel... And all of them called Negro…

[deleted]

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#355

Post by anonytrary »

Intent matters, and we shouldn't be allowed to be lazy and assume others' intent and then get angry at them because of our own assumptions. I don't see how banning this guy for speaking his language isn't just the most blatant normalized racism. This incentivizes people to remain ignorant and not learn about others' cultures. This is an embarrassing direction for a University to go in.

In general I think this micro-aggression/Karen-culture is an awful direction we are going in. At some point, being offended at everything is itself offensive. It is offensive to me that you choose not to understand me, and instead get mad about some fictitious damages.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#356

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

throwaway9221 wrote: post #349
vianneychevalie wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal case it would be using the words « master » and « slave » when talking about interfacing databases

Exactly. Or, say you're building some business logic and you need to make some exceptions for VIP partners. In times past, you would add these exceptions to a "whitelist" and have logic to check this list and apply the exception. Now, you need to be very careful to call this an "allowlist" lest the woke patrol pull you aside and warn you that your variable name is insensitive and non-inclusive. I wish I was joking.

And there's generally no exception for old things. Like many products, ours almost never permits breaking API changes, but an exception was of course made (at significant cost) to strip out public facing fields named "whitelist".

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#357

Post by coldtea »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #273
coldtea wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students Why, aren't they adults? (Over 17 will do in most countries to consider them so).

There's a common strain of thought in the US that it's actually a sign of maturity to be pained and upset by words. Immature people, the theory goes, don't have enough empathy to understand why a common word in a foreign language could be so hurtful.

That's not maturity, that's soapiness.

Or rather, to tell it as it is, it is a mix of the fragility of spoiled brats and feigned offense to be used to advance one's self...

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#358

Post by hn_acc_2 »

Simulacra wrote: post #224
spaniard89277 wrote: post #95

Honestly, I'm shocked everytime I read this stuff from american universities. Why is this happening? Because it's not the first nor second time that I read about events similar to this one.

It is happening because of power. Students have found that they can bully professors and administrators, and bend them to their personal beliefs. It's a sense of power that, like most forms of power, becomes very intoxicating.

Just like a two-year old enjoys their newfound power over their parents by screaming in public until they are appeased.

So too do students with authority issues enjoy exerting newfound power over the authorities they oppose by complaining to their risk-averse boss.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#359

Post by TechBro8615 »

jiofih wrote: post #343
TechBro8615 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is all a huge overreaction. But I also watched the video and honestly it looked like he was saying it because he knew he could get away with it. That's the most likely explanation for why he picked Chinese as an example of another language's "um" word. Just IMO though, no way to know for sure. It was at least tactless. He knew how it would sound.

Why the need to judge and condemn here? If it’s such a common word in Chinese speech, have you considered that it may be a common word for him?

He's a white communications professor from USA, so no not really
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