那個 is a verbal filler [1] as common and as harmless as um, like, you know…
I remember hearing it as the punchline of a joke highlighting a linguistic and cultural mixup. Never imagined the mixup would be taken as a serious offense.
Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
361–370 of 540 posts
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#362I 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
I think that’s where it’s use ends. It’s always been a niche word, but with todays common assumption it’s racist few will want use it at all.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any f…
Can you kindly provide an example of the type of behavior you might engage in at work in absence of the 'woke patrol' (as you described it)?
Not the OP but I personally enjoy lewd humour and, at a previous job, would crack jokes at some of my female colleagues. At my current job that would be considered altogether inappropriate, Despite the fact that that I only make those jokes around people I specifically know to be like-minded and give as good as they get, and avoid doing it around (or even within earshot of) people who are not ok with it.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#364> Last Thursday in your GSBA-542 classes, Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do b…
And suddenly the president's call to defund universities for "radical left indoctrination" sounds a tiny bit less crazy.
It was never crazy, just a wildly disproportionate knee-jerk reaction that ignores the real underlying issues, cultural and legal.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#365Some time ago a fellow countryman, a basketball player, made it into NBA. After a controversial ruling by a judge that one of his teammates performed a foul, he kept yelling "ni ga, ni ga, ni ga". Contextually translated, he meant "he hadn't touched him". He had to apologize profusely and explain to no end what he meant. Regardless, his career was soon over after that. We, non-native speakers, must be really careful…
>We, non-native speakers, must be really careful about using words in our own language that may sound offensive in the other language. What a world we created :( And it's in English as well. Growing up in Europe but heavily influenced by American Music, Movies, TV and Internet one grows up thinking that N----- or Nigga is fine to use. You hear it all the time, especially in music. Couple that with the fact that we do…
Yeah, I also noticed that Americans tend to handle every taboo word like "Voldemort". From when I was kid I always found it so odd how Americans use all of these one-letter variants of their taboo words (n-word, f-word, etc) even when everyone involved in the conversation is an adult and should be able to handle a bad word. It's one of the weirdest parts of their culture to me.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#366Anyone who is taught to look for racism everywhere - no matter how minor - will find it everywhere. The false-positive rate must be astronomical.
Yes! I am a female in the tech industry, and we are inundated with warnings about going into a male dominated field. I’ve noticed it gets to a point where some women can’t even receive criticism because they think “he wouldn’t talk to another man like that,” even if the criticism is valid. I can see why it happens though. We hear over and over about being harassed and put down that we almost subconsciously get a chip on our shoulder about it.
I’m not saying that racism or sexism doesn’t happen. But I am saying I see how a person can also take something as racist or sexist just because it’s something you’re told to expect.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only crazy conservative states like California with the strict age cutoffs.
>conservative >California Hollywood told us otherwise to Europeans, them.
California hasn't voted conservative since 1988. The cities are deep blue, though there are some red areas outside of the cities.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you kindly provide an example of the type of behavior you might engage in at work in absence of the 'woke patrol' (as you described it)?
In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia. Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which…
> In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia.
This reminds me of people hiding and covering table legs in the Victorian era.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#369I 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
IMHO - you would be wrong. It is a perfectly good word.
This horse-shit has to stop.
Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge
#370This action is so obviously wrong I can't but wonder if its not some prank. It would be an ideal prank for the Chinese in particular, to audit the course (at first as an attempt to see how Chinese language and culture is taught here), and then stumble upon this coincidental pronunciation, in the context of a tinder-dry atmosphere of political correctness, and send in (multiple) complaints and watch America burn just…
It would never be accidental. In China, English language students are taught to break that habit for fear of it being misinterpreted by a native English speaker. It could be opportunistically malicious though, to feign outrage. That’s not beyond the realm of possibility at all. Edit: people are asking how I ‘know’ this. —— It is anecdotal, so I should have phrased it more carefully. When I was in mainland China about…
Some English students might be taught that, but I'm far from certain that is the norm. In fact, I just asked three Chinese native speakers who learned English in China, and none of them was ever taught to avoid na ge / nei ge.