I genuinely don’t even understand what this means. Black people aren’t charcoal black.
For the lazy who don’t want to look it up
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
OwOarchist@pawb.social 1 day ago
Black people aren’t charcoal black.
According to old-timey racists, they are.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean I’m terrible with names but like, skin tones vary. Go back three generations and my great grandparents look very different from each other, only one of them is all that white but godsdammit they are the whitest shade of white that ever whited white. Albinos put on sunglasses when I walk by, I inherited it somehow from gamgam. You’d think it would have been recessive not dominant but here we are. I blame all the cheese we eat, gamgam loved cheese like I love cheese.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
In the 1950s … to average white people who might have never seen a black person before … they would imagine this
arrow74@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I can promise you that the vast majority of white Americans had seen a black person in the 1950s.
Atomic@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I know it’s difficult to grasp the idea that the world is larger than just the US. But you’ll juat have to try.
Midnight1938@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Remember the meme about the guy being immune to BnW filter?
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Alright, that’s actually pretty funny.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that’s how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I’d seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).
My friend is also charcoal black, so that’s definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).
rumba@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
While skin tones can vary, and in sun drenched parts of Africa, tones can get so dark brown that they look charcoal in appearance, It was just the book being written by a white man, for white kids, in an country where 99% were white that caused them to make the unwarranted comparison.
Pixel_Jock_17@piefed.ca 1 day ago
I’m just spitballing here but maybe back in the 1950s and earlier there wasn’t as much mixed race couples or children from those interracial marriages? Like today we have so many shades of “black” that maybe wasn’t as popular nearly 100 years ago.
Just a random thought
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Outdated but not offensive, a lot better than it could have been.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I’m too lazy even for this. I need a red circle and perhaps some Family Guy to get my attention.
Oka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Last word
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Ahh yes, the famous last word.
WesternInfidels@feddit.online 1 day ago
It feels so out of the blue, so unnecessary. Like the writer had been bored. It’s difficult to imagine that this didn’t jolt readers out of the story, even at the time.
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Languages change. Moron, idiot and imbecile used to be medical terms. Gay used to simply mean happy and excited. A fag used to be a term for a cigarette.
I really doubt it would have appeared in a mainstream children’s book if it were seen as at all offensive.
Words like “bugger” and “damn” used to be extremely offensive curses. Now they’re often used as very mild expressions of annoyance to avoid using the serious ones.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Fag still is a term for a cigarette…
starik@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
Yeah, but only in old-timey countries, like England.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I had always heard that it originally meant a stick to be used for kindling and was adapted to smoking once the tobacco trade was a thing. Probably complete horseshit because no internet when I was a kid, but I never bothered to look it up.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
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the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
Buggery used to be a crime, now it’s a gay way to spend an afternoon
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
I wonder if straight people were ever convicted of buggery with he opposite sex? I wouldn’t be surprised if “buggery” existed solely to persecute homosexuals back then.
(I was gonna say “non-straight” or “queer” but “homosexuals” read in 30’s English accent sounded funnier to me in my head)
merc@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
Nice one.
DamienGramatacus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Weren’t idiot, moron and imbecile medical terms specifically used by white scientists to describe black people back in the good old eugenics days of the 1920’s America? Language changes sure but it often has very racist roots.
merc@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
I’ve never heard anything about it having a racial component.
gerryflap@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Exactly. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, and it takes some getting used to that “queer” is used in a completely different way than nowadays.
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
Queer is a strange one for me, growing up it was a straight up offensive slur for gay people but now the LGBTQ community has embraced it hard enough to give it its own letter.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
I must be old, since the original meaning is still what comes to mind first when I hear it in a non-LGBTQ context.
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daggermoon@piefed.world 17 hours ago
This is from South Africa in the year 2000. It just means unusual in this context.
https://www.songlyrics.com/saron-gas/beer-lyrics/
fartographer@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
“Bah humbug,” was that era’s equivalent of Scrooge wandering around saying, “whatever, bullshit.”
SaraTonin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Enid Blyton used it a surprising amount. But she was also considered old-fashioned and racist by critics at the time, so…
Scrollone@feddit.it 1 day ago
I mean… there’s also a famous Agatha Christie’s book that used to have the N-word in its title.
We’re viewing these things with our modern eyes. But they didn’t have this kind of sensibility those days. It probably felt like using any other word: normal.
I wonder if our grandchildren will feel the same way about something we say normally today.
zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
until 1985!
zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
It was England, which never treated the n-world quite like those ungrateful colonials.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
It was called out for being offensive even in that time by fellow English.
Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I doubt whether the vast majority of British readers would’ve been jolted by it - at the time of first publication. It was a word that had been in everyday parlance that got attached to dark “things” as a describer.
Here’s the thing though, go forward maybe 15 years again and you have the 1964 Smethwick constituency election. The winner had a, uhh, memorable slogan: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
It’s worth noting that the “n*****s” in question were, most likely, gonna be from the Punjab. Go figure.
So, yeah, in less than a generation the word in question went from everyday speech with no overt pejorative meaning to the explicitly racist word it is today. It morphed.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
I mean it is from 1951. I’ve seen a lot worse by people who meant it.
It’s 4 years before Emmett Till was murdered for example.
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I wonder if Carlin ever tried sneaking that past the censors.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
George Carlin was voicing Mr Conductor in the American dubs in the 1990s, so a solid 20 years after the retraction
HikingVet@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I don’t remember him really weighing in on that word. And if I’m not mistaken he was friends with Richard Pryor.
zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
It was NOT one of his 7 words you can’t say on T.V.