Coming soon: the NFL's D.C. Cabs?

Mark2010 · Jun 26, 2014

outofplace said:

Mark2010 said:

It's obvious that OOP is one of these people who just looks for stuff to be offended about. Sort of leaves me wondering what his/her next pet cause might be.
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Speaking of butthurt, Mark is showing his right here. Come on, Mark. You are usually so proud of being a racist. Why lash out this time?
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I'm not the one lashing out, dude. Look in the mirror.

Boy has this thread ever gone off topic.

RonClements · Jun 26, 2014

jr/shotglass said:

Yeah! And while we're at it, what about the Carolina Fucking Panthers?
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Who is Carolina and why is she having sexual relations with large cats?

outofplace · Jun 26, 2014

Mark2010 said:

outofplace said:

Mark2010 said:

It's obvious that OOP is one of these people who just looks for stuff to be offended about. Sort of leaves me wondering what his/her next pet cause might be.
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Speaking of butthurt, Mark is showing his right here. Come on, Mark. You are usually so proud of being a racist. Why lash out this time?
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I'm not the one lashing out, dude. Look in the mirror.

Boy has this thread ever gone off topic.
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No, it really hasn't. You are complaining about people being offended by racial slurs and whining because you are being confronted with the bigotry you have so often displayed on this site. Making you face the truth is not lashing out. Don't want to be told you are a bigot? Stop acting like one.

MisterCreosote · Jun 26, 2014

jr/shotglass said:

Then explain it to me.
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Since you can't be bothered to actually read the thread you're posting your "Mark and schiez FTW!" bullshit on, here's a recap. Might want to read and understand it before you post again:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/a-linguist-on-why-redskin-is-racist-patent-overturned/373198/

Whatever the connotations of “redskin” now, the question facing the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was whether it was disparaging when the team first registered it as a trademark in 1967. If that was so, the registration would have fallen afoul of the provision of the Lanham Act that disallows the registration of trademarks that may disparage the members of a group. You have the right to pick a slur for your product name, the thinking goes, but you can’t expect the government to protect your exclusive use of it by restricting the speech of others.

That was the argument of the petitioners who first asked the US Trademark Office to cancel the mark in 1995, initiating a legal process that would wind up 19 years and two trials later in last week’s decision that the mark should be canceled, which is where things stand pending appeal. But the historical perspective made things more difficult for the petitioners, and for me, as their linguistics expert. How do you determine what the connotations of a word were back in the ‘60s?

That may not have been so terribly long ago, but the racial attitudes of that era can strike us as primordial. What should we make of the fact that before the mark’s registration, no dictionaries labeled “redskin” as offensive, the way they did slurs for blacks and Jews? In fact it was only in 1967 that the Random House Dictionary became the first to provide such a label, and more than a decade went by before any others followed suit.

The team’s attorneys and linguistics experts argued that this demonstrated that the term had never really been disparaging—just a “robust informal synonym” for “American Indian,” which dictionaries only started to label as offensive in response to political pressure from a few Indian activists. But lexicographers are creatures of their age, and before the ‘60s members of the dominant culture were selective in their sensitivities. Merriam-Webster’s monumental Third International, published in 1961, warned its readers off “nigger,” “chink,” and “kike,” but it didn’t feel the need to indicate that some people might also take offense at “white trash,” “gook,” “wetback,” “pansy” and “fag.” Not that those words hadn’t been derogatory or demeaning all along. It’s just that lexicographers and most everyone else weren’t capable of imagining how those words would land on the people they targeted.

“Redskin,” too, has been derogatory for a long time. It was recently discovered that the word actually began its life in English 200 years ago as a translation of an Indian term, via French—it didn’t have anything to do with those stories about bounties for bloody Indian scalps. But then “nigger” had a benign origin, as well. Since the mid-19th century “redskin” has simply been the slang word the white man used for the Indian, and like all slang words, it was infused with the attitudes about the thing it names. In the passages from books and newspapers and the movie clips we provided the court to document the word’s history, the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage.
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doctorquant · Jun 26, 2014

MisterCreosote said:

Whatever the connotations of “redskin” now, the question facing the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was whether it was disparaging when the team first registered it as a trademark in 1967.
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Would have been interesting had the board gone a different way with its decision (which, per this passage, conceivably the board could have done).

MisterCreosote · Jun 26, 2014

But it didn't. It judged that a word can still be disparaging even if not explicitly defined as such, given the prevailing paradigm of the era.

Bob Cook · Dec 15, 2014

This is being done with the utmost of honor and respect.

SEC Guy · Jun 26, 2014

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/24597380/washington-times-argues-redskins-should-change-name-to-reagans

jr/shotglass · Jun 26, 2014

MisterCreosote said:

jr/shotglass said:

Then explain it to me.
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Since you can't be bothered to actually read the thread you're posting your "Mark and schiez FTW!" bullshit on, here's a recap. Might want to read and understand it before you post again:
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Posting again for posterity.

MisterCreosote · Jun 26, 2014

Any thoughts on the explanation you asked for but somehow missed for the first 13 pages?

jr/shotglass · Jun 26, 2014

No. You said it wasn't worthy. And you're the arbiter. I bow to you. You've got the answers.

BTExpress · Jun 26, 2014

You have the right to pick a slur for your product name, the thinking goes, but you can’t expect the government to protect your exclusive use of it by restricting the speech of others.
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Something about that line is just odd.

It's like the government is saying, "OK, if you want to pick a slur for a name, that's your choice. But we're not going to stop 10,000,000 other people from using it as well.''

Just a little odd that the result of this action, as I mentioned some 10 pages ago, could likely be MORE usages of a word that many would like to see eliminated entirely.

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