Apparently a playful monk was a gamer.
Monday, July 7, 2014
Going Medieval on 'Em
Apparently a playful monk was a gamer.
Friday, July 4, 2014
Limes, 600k, and Other Unmentionables
A piece published in Slate today asks readers to use an alternate name for a mottled variety of citrus fruit. L.V. Anderson traces not so much the history of the kaffir lime (or makrut lime) as the history of the word kaffir, which is a racist epithet in South Africa. Not surprisingly, the reactions among readers are sharply divided with a lot of people who had been unfamiliar with the racial slur reacting with scorn at the suggestion.
Here's what the fruit actually looks like, courtesy of Andrew Lih.
The Michigan J. Frog cartoon uses only the chorus and leaves out most of the sharper epithets. One remains that had lost its slang meaning by 1955 when Warner Bros. covered it. In 1898 when the song was written, "honey" was not just a term of endearment--it referred to a woman who lived with a man without marriage--particularly if she were African-American, which was scandalous behavior in those days and went along with the stereotype that African-Americans were promiscuous.
That might not seem so different from gangsta rap until you realize that these songs weren't written by African-Americans, but by white people who were making caricatures. This is blackface minstrel material. Here's another sheet music cover from the genre.
Before you answer that let's spoil another fond childhood memory--if not one of yours then my own. One of the best things about the holidays as a kid was watching the mailbox as cards trickled in from friends and relatives, then seeing what lovely images they had. A few of the cards every year were reproductions from Currier & Ives, which looked like this or hand horses and sleigh bells.
Largely forgotten are one of Currier and Ives's other lithograph series: the Darktown Comics. I found 155 results for Currier and Ives Darktown Comics prints at the Library of Congress website, which is more results than their Christmas engravings.
Sometimes an epithet means nothing when it transits from one country to another: it took several conversations with an Australian to understand what a bogan is. In other instances slang meanings are totally different; I probably won't drop the habit of sometimes saying "roger that" to people, which is a polite and respectful affirmative in U.S. military slang. The meaning is totally different in the United Kingdom; sometimes I catch myself and mutual laughter results in chats with British friends. Fortunately they have taken no offense where none is intended.
So back to gaming (had to tie this in with the main blog theme eventually) there's an automated chat filter at the game I play, which--like any other chat filter--serves a limited purpose but lets a lot of stuff through and sometimes filters out completely innocent stuff. One of the innocent things it filters is a common abbreviation for 600,000: 600k. You can write k after any other number to indicate thousands, just not after 600. Most people have absolutely no idea why it intrudes because there are reasons in a war game to chat about quantities of things and that one filter action seems downright weird.
It may be a credit to cultural progress that this word no longer means something to young people. It seems to have had its last hurrah during the Vietnam War, and was still in use in movies about that war as late as the 1980s and 1990s. So my best guess is that during the early days of the Internet somebody added that and its leet version into a list of chat filter no-nos. Which was not a bad idea in theory, but in practice has had the unintended effect of introducing people to a racist epithet they hadn't known existed.
The minimum age to play this game is 13. Giving a 13-year-old a mystery that leads to the discovery of a Bad Word is something like giving Pandora a box and telling her not to open it. If you want the box to stay closed, keep it out of sight.
Here's what the fruit actually looks like, courtesy of Andrew Lih.
So what connection does this have to gaming? We'll get to that in a moment, but first I'll spoil a fond childhood memory. Remember this cartoon?
The song has an unsavory origin; here's a reproduction of the original sheet music cover.
It comes from a (thankfully, extinct) genre of music called coon songs, which were every bit as racist as the name implies.
The Michigan J. Frog cartoon uses only the chorus and leaves out most of the sharper epithets. One remains that had lost its slang meaning by 1955 when Warner Bros. covered it. In 1898 when the song was written, "honey" was not just a term of endearment--it referred to a woman who lived with a man without marriage--particularly if she were African-American, which was scandalous behavior in those days and went along with the stereotype that African-Americans were promiscuous.
That might not seem so different from gangsta rap until you realize that these songs weren't written by African-Americans, but by white people who were making caricatures. This is blackface minstrel material. Here's another sheet music cover from the genre.
So do you stop enjoying Michigan J. Frog?
Before you answer that let's spoil another fond childhood memory--if not one of yours then my own. One of the best things about the holidays as a kid was watching the mailbox as cards trickled in from friends and relatives, then seeing what lovely images they had. A few of the cards every year were reproductions from Currier & Ives, which looked like this or hand horses and sleigh bells.
Admittedly this is somewhat different because the Christmas greetings themselves aren't cleaned-up versions of overtly racist material, but the same partnership printed them both. I don't stop enjoying a nostalgic greeting card since learning this, yet it leaves me regarding the publisher differently. Also looking at the faces in those old prints more critically; they didn't do the diversity thing.
The point here is that if you dig around you can find bigotry in unexpected places including limes and cartoons of frogs. It turns out that L.V. Anderson isn't alone in preferring makrut lime to kaffir lime; The Oxford Companion to Food advises the same terminology choice, although these authors might not make much headway because kaffir lime is in wider use and most native speakers of English are unaware of the negative connotations. Personally I'll refer to the fruit by whatever name people recognize; in the part of the world where I live you have to be a serious foodie to know about it at all.
Sometimes an epithet means nothing when it transits from one country to another: it took several conversations with an Australian to understand what a bogan is. In other instances slang meanings are totally different; I probably won't drop the habit of sometimes saying "roger that" to people, which is a polite and respectful affirmative in U.S. military slang. The meaning is totally different in the United Kingdom; sometimes I catch myself and mutual laughter results in chats with British friends. Fortunately they have taken no offense where none is intended.
So back to gaming (had to tie this in with the main blog theme eventually) there's an automated chat filter at the game I play, which--like any other chat filter--serves a limited purpose but lets a lot of stuff through and sometimes filters out completely innocent stuff. One of the innocent things it filters is a common abbreviation for 600,000: 600k. You can write k after any other number to indicate thousands, just not after 600. Most people have absolutely no idea why it intrudes because there are reasons in a war game to chat about quantities of things and that one filter action seems downright weird.
It may be a credit to cultural progress that this word no longer means something to young people. It seems to have had its last hurrah during the Vietnam War, and was still in use in movies about that war as late as the 1980s and 1990s. So my best guess is that during the early days of the Internet somebody added that and its leet version into a list of chat filter no-nos. Which was not a bad idea in theory, but in practice has had the unintended effect of introducing people to a racist epithet they hadn't known existed.
The minimum age to play this game is 13. Giving a 13-year-old a mystery that leads to the discovery of a Bad Word is something like giving Pandora a box and telling her not to open it. If you want the box to stay closed, keep it out of sight.
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