You can't say the word squa in Maine

Ayuh...not much to do around heah...

HEY, what did the word "mean" originally mean? WHO CARES! I was brought up as a little kid believing that squaw simply meant "indian woman in a tribe". She was the one that took care of the home and family while the "warrior" was out getting food and/or protecting the tribe. Is that racist? NOPE! Is that even SEXIST? Not really.

HEY, I was taught maedchen meant "little girl" in german. You want to know what it REALLY means????? "little virgin girl". It is derived from MAED which is where the english phrase "old maid" comes from. In English it isn't 100% understandable, but the OLD meaning is "old virgin". And Backfisch(sp?) means "crazy(endearing) teenage girl". Who knows what THAT really means?

Even the word pariah! I was taught that means one that is shunned by society. Do you know what it REALLY means? It speaks of a VERY low indian(from india) caste. They ARE, to use the english term, pariahs.

Why are people SIMULTANEOUSLY associating words with beliefs, crazy theories, similar things, history, and stupid confiscations, and then doing THIS? As I have always said, we can NOT call something a
wowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowo wowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowo wowowowowowowowowowowowowo...manhole cover! THINK about it! MANHOLE, replace man with woman, and what do you have? Even the term woMAN has the word man in it! There is only SO much you can sanitize. And MAN in star trek's intro, and manhole cover does NOT mean adult male human. It means huMAN!!!!! Or should I say huwowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowo..ma n?

Steve

political correctness at its finest.

I've been trying to get "Hey Dad...got $20 I can have?" banned for years and haven't gotten anywhere yet

I can't wait till my dog has the right to bear arms.

"and you want to know when THEY are going to stop because the natives in the area are tired of hearing a word thats tantamount to you calling your wife a c*nt?"


Squaw - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"
The controversy increased when Oprah Winfrey invited the Native American activist Suzan Harjo onto her show in 1992. Harjo said on the show that "squaw is an Algonquin Indian word meaning vagina". As a result of these claims, some Native people have taken to spelling the word sq***, or calling it the "s-word" (Bright n.d.). This etymology has been widely adopted as the rationale for removing the word from maps, road signs, history books, and other public uses (Adams 2000).
However, according to Ives Goddard, the curator and senior linguist in the anthropology department of the Smithsonian Institution, this statement is not true (Bright n. d.; Goddard 1997). The word was borrowed as early as 1621 from the Massachusett word squa (Cutler 1994; Goddard 1996, 1997), one of many variants of the Proto-Algonquian *eθkwe·wa[4] (Goddard 1997); in those languages it meant simply "young woman". Although Algonquian linguists and historians (e.g. Goddard 1997, Bruchac 1999) have rejected Harjo's proposed etymology, it has been repeated by several journalists (e.g. Oprah Winfrey)."

In other words, thats BS. It isn't a sexual term.

You want to ban a really derogatory term?

What's In A Name? - CBS News

I stand corrected.

What's really scary Michael is that shows how much power someone like Oprah has.
And that so many will take what they see and hear on her show, and other shows like hers, as gospel. In addition, its also scary how Ophra doesnt seem to do much in the way of fact checking of her guests either.

i was wondering when oprah became regarded as a journalist

It is REALLY a shame when some women seem to HATE being women SO much that they even denigrate WOMEN claiming that to call one a woman is sexist. INCREDIBLE!

I met a woman once who, ironically, said she was an indian. She spoke of how boys consider it an INSULT to be called girls! OF COURSE! And GIRLS consider it an insult to be called boys. What is wrong with that? I don't want to appear to be female, but wouldn't want anyone I marry to appear male. That isn't saying that males hate females, etc.... That is WRONG! I wouldn't want to buy a pink or purple car, but wouldn't mind if my wife did. It is odd, but that is the way it works. Hey, would a black want to be called white or asian?

OH, and the N word DOES have an equal! It is OBVIOUSLY directly related to a word that is VERY similar in latin, romance, and germanic languages. It simply means BLACK! Even the name of the RACE is related! Ironically, it IS the only race named by color. The white and asian races were named based on where the first bones were discovered. I CAN understand the hatred towards the N word SIMPLY because it has been so often used in a derogatory and formerly racist way. TODAY, blacks use it among themselves as the black equivalent of the white phrase "poor white trash". SO, CONTRARY to the squaw claim and even those speaking about the N word, the hatred is NOT because of meaning, but connotation.

Steve

I think we should have an amendment making people stupid enough to get their education for Oprah illegal- send them to enemy soil to breed. That'll teach people to mess with the great US!

We've done a lot of stuff to a lot of people - any time you have someone in power somebody is gonna get abused.

Linguists should be the ONLY people allowed to legislate language. There's more to know about language than even the average English student even knows there IS to know. Now you have people from other disciplines deciding language.

Indian women should wear the term Squaw proudly. It does not in one way subordinate the Indian woman to the Indian male. By having completely separate morphemes representing each gender, it shows that in the native Indian cultures the female was seen as an intellectual equal to the male - there was a division of labor, but in no way were the woman looked at as being stupid or inferior because they did their part of family support at home instead of on the hunt.

Okay - Linguistics lesson from the field of Socio-linguistics (101).
1. a morpheme is the smallest syllable of speech which carries meaning:
In this particular case we will use "man". Single syllable, meaning = morpheme
2. A culture tends to label ideas that are central to their culture in single morphemes.
(some exceptions, as will all "rules" but this is the overwhelming case).
3. When you add morphemes to a word you are making a subclass of the word.
Thusly - in German you will see that the word for man and woman are completely different - Herr/frau. This suggests that there are two different identities that tie to the word, not an identity and a subclass of that identity. If you have ever lived in the German culture (and I have) you will find that there is a division of labor, but you won't find that the woman's intellect is belittled. At the dinner table at night, if Frau speaks, her ideas are given equal relevance to that of the Herr.

Now get to American English in which we see "man" and "women". Women are actually being subconsciously classified as a sub-class of the male - that is, just a subordinate or even inferior section of a whole. The language itself developed a subordination of the female, and the treatment they have traditionally received has reflected this subconscious state. While this is being eased by our pronunciation of the word into unsubordinating forms, it is easy to see how our society developed into
a society of males that thought they were intellectually superior to women. (Okay -
I'll admit there's still a lot of females who are actually very stupid but it's a socialized
pattern and not an innate one - and there's a lot of guys pressing the bimbo button, too - by not developing equivalent terms for male stupidity, we are meant to not notice it, LOL).
4. Now you come to Brave and Squaw. Not the same morphemes. There is no way this was a word used by that culture to descriminate against the woman. Again, there was division of labor but hers was not seen as inferior to his and she was probably taken quite seriously when she spoke no matter what other customs were in place - the LANGUAGE did not subordinate her. SO anyone that says otherwise is just ignorant of how language works on a subconscious psychological/cultural level.

I can see why Indians would fight against anything we do. What we did was dispicable. But if Indians think that it is the WORD "squaw" that was used to degrade their women, they have not seen that the English word for women is so innately degradational that it is just that the CULTURE coming in degraded women anyway. There is no way they were going to not degrade the women of another culture that they found barbaric when they thought their own women were nothing but inferior and given to them in the form of mindless little baby producing servants.

The Indians should embrace their native linguistics which are fashioned to show an interactive world as being far superior to our User/instrument form of language which shows the propensity of our people to think that anything on earth is just put here for them to do with as they please.

Heysal,

Using the same idea you seem to work off of, HUMAN would be subordinate to the male, and that makes no sense.

HECK, is a male chimp then considered superior to a female human?(NOTE, this is an EXAMPLE, NOT a statement!)

HECK, the TRUTH is that in MANY primate cultures, in a way, most females are treated nicer than the males. The males have to fight for their place, or split.

Frankly, I think a lot of people in the US were trying to maintain a culture and simply tried longer than most cultures. The idea was that women would go from their parents family to their own, and that the man would work, and the woman would take care of the home, etc... MUCH like those indians! The men were supposed to be on their BEST behaviour around the women. Even GERMANY is not as it once was.

I think you are taking the WORST men in the WORST area at the WORST time in the US and comparing them to a culture that still had much of the good. As this point, the average is probably roughly comparable.

Steve

"HECK, the TRUTH is that in MANY primate cultures, in a way, most females are treated nicer than the males. The males have to fight for their place, or split."

It's funny you said this.
I was watching a recent show on one of the History channels and it was explaining how the indina women were treated with reverence most of the time, and that they had equal if not greater stature in the tribe that most warriors and some chiefs.
It went on to explain that if a white man married an indian bride, they were usually welcomed with open arms into the tribe,and that an indian bride was a sign of stature to the mountaineers.

I was talking about male vs. female being the same as man vs. woman.

HEY, YOU started it, I didn't!

Want to REALLY start an argument? I REALLY hate words like cr*p!

BTW As long as we are talking about language and its parts to show treatment, etc... Something to chew on.....

Males are considered masculine or nueter, based on article.
Females are considered feminine, masculine or nueter, based on article.
herrlich means beautiful, charming, etc....
I was SURE there was a word damelich that meant ugly or horrible.

Oh well, sometimes languages just CHANGE! And english is supposedly partly from danish which comes from german. And they call MEN chauvanist PIGS sometimes, in the US, but do you know what the danish word "pige" means in english? Here's a hint, "svin" means pig! Pige means GIRL! Just to be fair, and so there is no misunderstanding, Pige IS pronounced basically like pee-ah, so it doesn't SOUND like pig.

Steve

Put down the coffee, back off the rittalin. you're getting to wired again steve.

Actually, as funny as it sounds, I have the correct spelling and usage!