Boundaries

[miminnehaha]

Right, I've got your meaning now, which is perfectly valid. I surprise and confuse some people by being an absolute bleeding heart liberal in some respects, but believing violence is perfectly appropriate in others. If you want to pick the optimal result, you have to pick the best you can get in the immediate circumstances, and sometimes, IMO, the immediate circumstances make violence a local optimum.

People forget this, living in some pretty comfortable circumstances...

[miminnehaha]

People are strange, people from the next village are stranger, any further than that and we're getting into seriously wierd. We shouldn't try to force every conversation into the perceptions we'd use at home. It's possibly easier for those of us who aren't American*, all of the team are foreigners and there's that distance no matter whether they come from the South, New England or Hawaii.

Did any of you catch Eddie Izzard on the BBCA?  (to America): "... did you know there are other countries?" 


America: "Well, yeah, but..."

[stardreamer]

(By my lexicon, Yankees are properly *only* New Englanders.)

I don't know that I can swing that as my main definition, although it has been entered as a secondary one. Right now I'm just working on not saying it as if it always has "damn" in front of it.

I didn't respond to this at the time, because at the time there wasn't anything I could think of to say that wouldn't have lost its vowels. But having browsed back thru here and been reminded...

MG, thank you for illustrating my original point. That sort of comment has been made to me, more than once. When I object, the conversation then runs predictably thru "It was just a JOKE, where's your sense of HUMOR?" to complaints about Political Correctness. For that reason, I politely decline to accept arguments from born-and-raised Southerners that it's not REALLY meant as an insult. I consider this to be an instance of fish not seeing the water.

[MadGastronomer]

Well, it's pretty mutual. When Southerners grow up hearing banjo, inbreeding, and lynching jokes from Northeasterners, and one has to deal with snowbirds and tourists who are, by our standards, really rude, the grudge builds pretty solidly, and it's hard not to want to put "damn" in front of it, even if some of us try to justify it as a joke.

But I'm proud to say I've managed, in the year-and-a-half since I posted that, to mostly switch my definition of "Yankee" from "Anybody from north of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi," to "New Englander." Mostly.

[MadGastronomer]

Also, seriously, did you just reopen this topic after it had become a lot more civil and had been dead for a year and a half?

Look, I know you have a bad history with the way Southerners treat Northerners, but plenty of Southerners, me included, have just as bad experiences in the opposite direction, and I really don't appreciate you bringing this back up. It's put me in a foul mood.

[jimsmyth]

As a New Englander, I don't mind being a Yankee.  And the Southerners I've known have all been decent, gracious people, with a culture that reflects their kinder, gentler winters.

Can't we all just get along?

[Elizabeth Bear]

As a New Englander, I don't mind being a Yankee.  And the Southerners I've known have all been decent, gracious people, with a culture that reflects their kinder, gentler winters.

Can't we all just get along?

I consider being a Yankee a badge of honor. I just hate to see other people embarrassing themselves by misapplying the term in too broad a sense. Not every horse is an Arabian, after all.

[eschatonic]

As a Californian, I've gotta say the whole debate seems like a ridiculous thing to get all upset about. All you easterners take yourselves too seriously.

California: now officially less weird than Florida, and "medical" marijuana is still legal.

[tylik]

As a Californian, I've gotta say the whole debate seems like a ridiculous thing to get all upset about. All you easterners take yourselves too seriously.

California: now officially less weird than Florida, and "medical" marijuana is still legal.

While I feel your pain, as a west coaster myself, I think it's worth remembering that there's a lot of history and pain wrapped up in some of these things, and it's easy as an outsider to dismiss it.

[DavidG]

As a Californian, I've gotta say the whole debate seems like a ridiculous thing to get all upset about.

I've seen similar things here over Cockney and Geordie. Both have a stricter geographical definition, and a common one, both can be used for inappropriate stereotyping, and some people who were born in the more strictly defined area can get very irate over people using the common definition rather than the strict one. And when we get down to Mackem or Geordie then we're into religious issues as intense as anything from the Mac-PC or ?nix-Windows wars, even though everyone else just calls us Geordies. I think it comes down to community and 'them' always being more amorphous than 'us'.

[eschatonic]

As a Californian, I've gotta say the whole debate seems like a ridiculous thing to get all upset about. All you easterners take yourselves too seriously.

California: now officially less weird than Florida, and "medical" marijuana is still legal.

While I feel your pain, as a west coaster myself, I think it's worth remembering that there's a lot of history and pain wrapped up in some of these things, and it's easy as an outsider to dismiss it.

99% of which happened before the people arguing about it were born. Now it's just tribalism, and I say this as a person who has had heated arguments about whether or not "hella" is a word, and whether or not it is proper to use the definite article when referencing a freeway.

...for the non-Californians, those are northern vs southern California dialect issues. The resentment is really about water rights, which were settled before we were born and involved screwing over a huge number of people and vast environmental damage that will never be rectified. I realize this isn't on the same level as the Civil War, Jim Crow, and a century and a half of northern contempt, but at some point we have to admit that things have changed and resenting people based on their birthplace is retarded.

[txanne]

Er. "Retarded" is kind of like "gay," in that it stigmatizes a condition one is born with. I'm trying to replace it with "willfully stupid" and/or "ignorant," depending on the degree of malice; people who have never had the chance to learn better are "ignorant," and people like Donald Trump are "willfully stupid."

[eschatonic]

Hmmm, yeah, sorry. We need a better word for people of normal intelligence acting like idiots, as distinguished from people who have a disability and from whom we should not expect adult mentation.

[InkRose]

In this particular context, I'm inclined to think 'absurd' would fit the bill pretty well. It's interesting to me to notice, BTW, that I haven't heard 'retarded/retard' used like that since maybe junior high. And even then it was the immature (even for a 14-year-old boy from a severely dysfunctional family) bully who used it. I see it online, of course, but not really in Finnish discourse. Or maybe I don't hang out with 10-15-year-olds enough anymore, but I guess that's more or less normal when you're a family man fast approaching 30.

[tylik]

In this particular context, I'm inclined to think 'absurd' would fit the bill pretty well. It's interesting to me to notice, BTW, that I haven't heard 'retarded/retard' used like that since maybe junior high. And even then it was the immature (even for a 14-year-old boy from a severely dysfunctional family) bully who used it. I see it online, of course, but not really in Finnish discourse. Or maybe I don't hang out with 10-15-year-olds enough anymore, but I guess that's more or less normal when you're a family man fast approaching 30.

I've certainly heard it more recently than that... though among members of some geek circles, which might be an equivalent class to junior high.

(Well, and then there was my mom telling a boyfriend of mine how she used to think I was retarded. But that was a bit ago, and my mom is kind of special thay way.)