“Canadian” the new N-word euphemism?
It’s come to my attention that “Canadian” is the new n-word, something that is both baffling and disturbing to me:
The bigger mystery is how “Canadian” came to be code for black. An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a “masked replacement” for black.
Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. “She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn’t understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else,” the blogger wrote.
“After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian’ was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to nigger.”
A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that “fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians…. They’re all yours.’”
The article concludes that the term “Canadian” is being used by racists to refer to black Americans because it affords a cultured sense of otherness, and because other immigrant nationalities, such as “Mexican,” would have been too obvious.
Urban Dictionary at least lends some credence to this alternate definition, odious as it is. Hopefully this is just a linguistic passing phase, limited only to a few select idiots in the Southern USA.
Update: There is an article in Passport Foreign Policy which says, “There is just so much wrong with this situation on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin. So, you be the judge.”
Unnecessary quotation marks
If you’re a grammar fanatic, or even just an everyday English-speaker, you’ll be both fascinated and amazed at
the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks. For example:
A submitter who prefers to remain anonymous sent me this. Talk about a front for the mob…
There’s also a fascinating Flickr group called “Quotation Mark” Abuse that’s well worth checking out. For those interested in the rules, quotation marks should be used to set off actual speech. The quotation mark can be further abused as a mark of irony, distancing the writer from the word or phrase contained. You can check out Wikipedia for more rules.
How to Cite a Blog: Citation style
The NLM style guide now has a special format for citing blogs. Beyond how cool it is that blogs are considered authoritative enough to warrant their own formal citation style, the new “general format for a reference to a blog on the Internet” is remarkably sensitive to the temporal nature of the web. For example, this entry could be cited as:
Bäck E. Books Blog [Internet]. New York: Elliott Bäck. 2004 Nov - [cited 2007 Oct 12]. Available from: books.elliottback.com/?p=147
They strongly recommend including the word “blog” in the title if it is not already there to indicate that the citation refers to a blog. Also interesting is the date of publication, which is given as the date of the first post that can be found in the archives.
BBC Swear Word Frequency Charts
A report titled Delete Expletives? by the Advertising Standards Authority of the British Broadcasting Corporation correlates various English swear words with how well they are perceived. Statistically, “c*nt” and “m*therf*ck*r” are the most offensive, while “bloody” and “god” round off the bottom of the list.
Thanks to the fantastic Ben Goldacre for digging this up!
Strange Names for Things
Check out this list of 33 unusual names for plain old nouns, featuring such goodies as:
AGLET - The plain or ornamental covering on the end of a shoelace.
DRAGÉES - Small beadlike pieces of candy, usually silver-coloured, used for decorating cookies, cakes and sundaes.
OCTOTHORPE - The symbol ‘#’ on a telephone handset.
SCROOP - The rustle of silk.
Honestly, I’d never heard of these and I question their use. But they are neat!