No Snickers in Gay Bars - another example of hysteria

Black-balled: (v): What used to happen to Carmen Electra's chin.

 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Other times, not so much.

 

alley --
You're cross-posting now. It's hard to get a bead.
You know as well as I do that "articulate" doesn't just mean "well-spoken" in our current context, at least not to many of the people to whom it has been addressed. In the case of language, the spirit of American apartheid has learned to be subtle -- outside of certain talk-shows, and meetings of certain GOP state committees, it's not polite to just yell, "Lazy n's!" any more. -- and to disguise itself. There's nobody here ever attempting to argue the notion that this wasn't at one time the case. Consequently, as a result of centuries of mischief, certain words in context carry more freight than Noah Webster provided them. Use "lascivious" in connection with black males, for example, you're not just summoning up Rick James, you're summoning up the historical basis for an awful lot of domestic terrorism, from 1690 onwards. The dispute over "articulate" is at the gentle end of that. It's unfortunate, but no less real.

 

Sorry, but the first thought that comes to my mind when I say articulate is that the person is well-spoken. Plain and simple, nothing more. Do some use it as a euphamism? Sure, but I'm not going to be held responsible for them.

Lascivious is tied to domestic terrorism? Since when? I have never once used that term in reference to race or terrorism, nor have I ever heard it referred to that way.

 

I'm fairly sure lascivious was tied to miscegenation laws.

I remember reading a story about the word being used to describe 2 Live Crew, and the implications thereof.

 

As a kid, I grew up in a government housing project and a trailer park. Almost no black people in the project and zero in the trailer park. They were still ghettoes as far as I was (and am) concerned.

 

Never knew that, and I grew up in Texas. The dictionary version is the only definition I've known: wantonness, lust.

 

If you use "lascivious" in connection with black males, you are summoning up the miscegenation hysteria at the low end, and the black-men-will-rape-our-white-women hysteria at the high end that was part and parcel of the philosophy by which black men were whipped, beaten, lynched and burned, in and out of slavery for 300 years. (Historian Margaret Coit, in her bio of JC Calhoun, called that fear "the deadweight on the conscience of every Southerner.") All of that - plus the Klan -- qualifies as "domestic terrorism" to me.
And, if you think the whole thing is Christmas Past, remember Bob Corker made considerable hay out of that same dynamic with the "Harold, call me!" ads in the Senate race this year.

 

Problem is, it's NOT plain and simple.

If you want to keep it that way, that's your right. But no one can deny the existence of another layer surrounding our language.

Because, as FB, Zeke & I have tried to demonstrate, that layer exists, and it forms part of how we communicate. Your refusal to accept it doesn't make it go away.

It's like saying Moby Dick is a novel about a whale. Uh, yeah, kinda but there's a little more to it than that.

 

Back to Snickers.

Regardless of whether gays were being oversensitive, wasn't this just an ill-conceived commercial all around?

A certain segment of the gay and gay-friendly population was going to get offended.

A certain segment of the straight population was going to be grossed out by two guys kissing.

And from what I can tell, this hasn't even been the good type of controversy that gets more people interested in your product. The whole thing has just been a train wreck.

To whom exactly was this ad supposed to appeal?

 

I thought the commercial was saying if you try to meet someone halfway, you'll regret it. So, no compromise, no detente. Ban Snickers from the U.N.