whitewash has more meaning than that though. it's a mixture of like, lye and water and some sort of white stain and it's used for walls and fences when people are too poor to buy paint. it has the connotation of... i guess ... hiding flaws without fixing the underlying problem? the whole "white-washed seplucher" thing... obviously Jesus wasn't digging white people... but they were literally staining graves white to make them look cleaner rather than dusting. get me?

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i think it's because people generally argue that white isn't a color, much like black, but rather a shade. these people are of course, idiots.

if someone says "fuck you" to me, i take them up on the offer. generally, this illicits(sp?) a chuckle, but if i were living in a porno then that chuckle would be followed by some hardcore bow-chick-a-bow

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okay i was debating this the other day. can there be shades of black? i'm pretty sure black is just black. if two things are both labeled as black, but they don't match, one of them is NOT really black.

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exactly

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how do you know what the people in the factory were thinking? and just because it's not a thought on the forefront of their minds it does speak to their subconscious thoughts at least.

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i don't know, hence the "necesarily"s and "probably"s. but if they're actively racist, then the rest of the argument is irrelevent anyway. and i agree, it does, but what is it saying about their thoughts

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ack, don't get me started on the idiocy of PC jargon and nit-picking language.

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no, please do get started. that was the point of my post - i feel the same way about how stupid it is, but i was thinking about that last night and can sortof see their point

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my pet peeve is "mankind." in this case the term "man" doesn't mean "male", it's a generic term for people in general. if you're going to be all pissy about that, why not be pissy about "humankind" too? hey look, it's got "man" in it too! blasphemy!

the day I went in to help my mom grade spelling tests, I was looking through the new writing books. apparently now you're supposed to address a business letter to "Dear Chair" instead of "Dear Chairman" or Chairperson.

*shrug* maybe I'm just extra easily annoyed. sometimes when I'd write papers I'd deliberately use Mankind just to irk my professors. heh.

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i get so peeved at people who use "humankind" or things like that; they don't realize that "man" in that sense IS a generic term meaning people as a whole. they just automatically assume it's sexist.

however, my dad is a chair of a department and they all call him (and the women chairs) "chair." i think it developed out of convenience and not being PC.

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no, i think they understand it's a generic term in that sense. the problem is, the generic term chosen IS the word for males, who get to represent the whole species. that's what's sexist about it. or so the argument goes

who is this, btw?

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wymymkind, yo.

i'm going to address a letter to Chair, and if a person answers have them arrested for mail fraud because it wsn't addressed to them, but to their chair.

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I don't think I could even send a real business letter out with that heading--at least, not without much snarky giggling before hand.

wymyn. argh. *sponges it from the English lexicon*

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so i am reading through old posts and i spotted this. i just last week learned the Evil Truth about mankind, etc.

apparently back in the day, when we were basically speaking shitty german, 'man'[1] really did mean generic person. wo- was the prefix for female, and there was another prefix for male. at some point we lost the male prefix. i suppose that doesn't change the argument, since man does mean male person now and its history is irrelevent to such things, but i thought it was neat to find out how we got man/woman.

[1] okay, it was actually 'mann' or something, because we're talking germanic here. and the female prefix, which i now forget, was not exactly wo-. i think the male prefix was something like wyr-, which eventually morphed into were-, as in werewolf.

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veeerry interesting. *taps her chin*

fo' real, yo. word history is fun. :) I think I was one of the few people who actually enjoyed my "history of the English language" course. it was required for all branches of English Majors and most people cried every night they were enrolled.

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i liked my history of the english language class too. it wasn't required at unh though, it was an obscure little linguistics class. why would they require it for, say, aspiring journalists? that's like an even more useless gen ed

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I liked my class so much that I did an independent study with the same prof. she was very cool--knew tons of stuff about old & middle english, and could speak them both.

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sweet! what was the ind. study?

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in-depth reading and study of Beowulf, Gawain & the Green Knight, and selections from Canterbury Tales. she didn't make me read them in the old or middle english (a good thing), but my editions were dual-language so we did a lot of word comparison between the translations and the originals. it was my favorite uni class over the whole four years. :)

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i never read gawain, but slogging thorugh beowulf and parts of the canterbury tales in school was always a torture to me. i'm a bad english major - i hate most of the classics.

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I can see why Canterbury Tales aren't a favorite of the masses. they were my least favorite assignment for the study, but I definitely prefer them to Virginia Woolf.

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never read any woolf

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don't bother. vastly overrated, in my not so very humble opinion.

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heh. well i have a book (i forget which) buried in my room somewhere. one of these days i might even open it

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if I was you I'd skip opening it and move it directly to the firestarter pile. I've had to read Orlando, To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, and..um...one more that I can't remember. but I hated them all. then again, I'm in the minority with my Woolf Loathing (tm).

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