• milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    But neither is your skin colour expressed in Latin. It becomes a slur based on how and when it’s used.

    I agree with feeling ‘obese’ is a neutral, objective term for the physical/medical fact. But then, coming from a non-Anerican context, I used to have no sense of the N word being so offensive, any more than any other random insulting (or even affectionate!) term.

    In the wrong context, ‘obese’ can certainly be hurtful and inappropriate. I can imagine, for some people, it’s a trigger word of years of pain and mockery.

    • Etterra@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Look I’m a fat American and here at least nobody I’ve ever heard has used “obese” as a slur. You hear actual insults, “fatass” comes immediately to mind but there’s plenty of others; I’ve heard plenty of them personally. The OP in the pic is a fucking doctor according to her obscured user name and needs to be far more responsible. Obesity is party of a medical status - being called a land whale is an insult.

      Further, the N-word has centuries of racist cultural weight behind it. The word “obese” is far more recent and isn’t used as part of the systematic oppression of an entire ethnic to group - one that makes up an enormous amount of American population.

      This isn’t even apples and oranges. This is cantaloupes and blueberries. Not watermelons though, that has racist baggage too.

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        She’s off her rocker to compare the two, but I do want to say people are policing medical terms as being offense, so maybe she was trying to express (very poorly) that obese should be considered offensive like using the terms retarded, idiot, or what not that started as a medical diagnosis/meaning, and now can be viewed as hurtful. I don’t agree with it because the reasonsaying the term retard is insulting is because the person you are calling it isn’t actually fitting the medical diagnosis, and therefore using a medical term to put other people down. (Doubt it is used by doctors today, they likely have found different ways of expressing a person’s mental growth in terms of comparing to average growth, growth within science and all that). So if we were calling people who were not obese obese to put them down, maybe it would start to make sense, but it hasn’t occured around me much. That said, I have seen jokes made around belimic people calling themself a fat ass for eating say a slice of pizza, but even most movies have moved away from joking about such anymore.

    • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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      4 months ago

      But neither is your skin colour expressed in Latin.

      Niger is Latin… Nigger is not.

      While I’m generally not sensitive to these things, claiming something that’s factually not true as a defense of the word is just not okay. Use the word if you really want to use it. If you use it in any other way other than academically (such as discussing the word in of itself)… don’t surprise pikachu when people shun you for it.

        • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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          4 months ago

          Not according to the etymology. https://www.etymonline.com/word/nigger

          1786, earlier neger (1568, Scottish and northern England dialect), negar, negur, from French nègre, from Spanish negro (see Negro).

          All of these languages are latin-based languages… So there must be a latin root. If you dig further you find

          from Latin nigrum (nominative niger) “black, dark, sable, dusky” (applied to the night sky, a storm, the complexion), figuratively “gloomy, unlucky, bad, wicked,”

          So yes negro exists in the middle but not as the source necessarily… It would have evolved (if I read the etymology correctly) as Nigrum -> Niger -> Negro/neger/negar/negur -> Nigger.

          • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Good thing the N word is being censored here, otherwise we might actually learn something.

            I fucking hate indiscriminate censorship. In some context the word is important in order to learn and educate

            • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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              4 months ago

              Yeah… While admittedly discussions like this one are far outweighed by the negative uses of the term; when discussion is happening where clarity is more relevant than appeasing the euphemism treadmill censorship sucks.

              https://lemmy.saik0.com/comment/3423797 should get you to the original version. My instance doesn’t censor.

        • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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          4 months ago

          Jeez, you’re really out here word policing when it’s clear we’re simply talking about the word… You know… not actually attributing it.

          You act like just saying “Negro” with no context is any better.

          Just like your namesake, you’ve added nothing to the discussion except a bit of toxicity.