(July 31, 2016 at 6:23 pm)Little lunch Wrote: I am guilty of calling the English pommys.
I'm also guilty of calling Americans yanks and the New Zealanders kiwis.
It's traditional in Australia to call our friends names and these are our best friends.
It's like, we know these guys so well we can get away with being cheeky.
It's a matter of context. Many words which used to be, or still are offensive can be used as terms of endearment among people, who have no reason to suspect each other of ill will. Friends can call one other "cunt", even though if you used the same word against a stranger, you may well be looking at the business end of a fist. Black people get to use the n-word, openly homosexual guys can jokingly refer to themselves as "queens", "queers", or "fags" without causing much upset - because no one thinks they're trying to insult their own group (even though sometimes they might). I don't believe words like "kiwi" have any negative connotations anyway, while others - like "pommy" have lost their original meaning to the point, where pretty much no one can explain, what the word actually mean, or where it came from.
(July 31, 2016 at 6:23 pm)Little lunch Wrote: It's a fine line though. I once accused my late grandma of being racist and she said, 'I am not, I always say hello to the ching chong chinaman when he walks past my front yard.'
Yeah, well - that's the "benevolent" kind of racism. It comes from ignorance and old timey propaganda, rather than hatred; people who say such things often have no idea, that what they're saying can be insulting, or factually wrong. I see that a lot in people from my country of origin - Poland, where there are virtually no racial minorities to speak of, so people's idea of what Africans, or Asians are like comes from old movies and nursery rhymes.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
