A couple brief statements

[bellatrys]

Really brief, not just brief for me - RL has, to mince no words, been dire, and I have been spending most of the last week alternately looking desperately for another job, feeling too sick about having to go in to work to function, and trying to do something that will just possibly be salable in terms of visual art which means that I have to spend

Comments

[david_wisdom]

Does anyone actually *know* - not just shooting your mouth off, not just the typical non-answery asspull speculation - where the beloved conservative anecdote about "niggardly" comes from? With citations?

David Howard, aide to DC Mayor Anthony Williams, used the word in a private conference regarding funding. He resigned, but was later rehired.

And all I'm gonna say about that is that I can think of about half a dozen synonyms for "cheap" off the top of my head that don't sound like racial slurs and are much more commonly used. And that I don't particularly care if a vaguely archaic word that does greatly resemble a racial slur falls out of use, particularly in light of my previous point.

[ginmar]

So who cares if there are other synonyms? Why can't he use whatever word he wants? The word's Scandinavian; who knows what his background is.

So if someone said

[bellatrys]

"pusi ... llanimous," there would be nothing at all questionable about that? There would only be "feminazi overreaction" if anyone said "WTF, dude?"

...or was that deadpan snark?

[bellatrys]

They only had small coffee cups left at the corner store this morning and I'm out at home.

[acaciaonnastik]

My Wikipedia-fu, while for some reason it has not revealed to me what it was that the guy actually said, does incline me to believe that the original incident was not a dogwhistle but a genuine Clueless White Guy, because of what he said when he came back:
"[...]the mayor offered Howard the chance to return to his position as Office of the Public Advocate on February 4. Howard refused but accepted another position with the mayor instead, insisting that he did not feel victimized by the incident. On the contrary, Howard felt that he had learned from the situation. "I used to think it would be great if we could all be colorblind. That's naive, especially for a white person, because a white person can't afford to be colorblind. They don't have to think about race every day. An African American does."

[voxwoman]

the second example (woman with the broken car) probably came from an obscure comedian's stand-up routine that turned into an email chain letter that was picked up by someone and blogged about. I have no proof, but that's how a lot of these things happen. (the comedian in question probably was stuck at the side of the road or had an acquaintance stuck at the side of the road and was unable to get assistance right away, because it's nighttime or they're scary in some way, or it was in the days before cell phones and no other drivers called it in to the highway patrol). But I'm talking out my ass, because I don't have a clue.

Not entirely related, but...

[wombat1138]

ISTR reading an anecdote written by an African-American about a white acquaintance who said to him (in apparent jocularity about some unimportant manner, but also deliberately stressing the last two syllables of the word in question), "You mean you went back on your word? That makes you a reNEGERWhich just confused me for a while, since at the time, the root verb fell into my have-seen-but-never-heard category; I'd thought it was pronounced with a soft G and would sound like the first syllable of the Brit version of "leisure

[fridgepunk]

I'm surprised no one linked to Kali921's ultimate Scans_Daily post, with a GIANT SCREENCAP of what went down at Scans_Daily to start it all off.

Only know Peter David from Trek novelisations

[deiseach]

Didn't like them; didn't like his characterisation, his writing, his anything.

Was mildly surprised most reviewers and fans seemed to think he was the cat's pyjamas.

Know nothing about his subsequent career in comics or the scans_daily brouhaha, but am not surprised he does not get the point of fandom if it's not "Wow, how amazingly brilliant this latest issue is! Every time I think it can't get better, he goes out and proves me wrong!" because he was a bad writer on Trek and I go by a person's work.

[deiseach]

I note in that link you provided that he didn't actually address any of the criticism of how he was writing (or failing to write) the characters; it was all "How dare you be so nasty! Writing you hope that I Die In A Fire! Who do you think you are, anyway?"

[fridgepunk]

Well you have to remember that according to PD the person supposedly using his name in that thread was really his wife (who's parents are DEEEAAAAD! friend died in a fire).