The Great National Barroom Brawl
You have to laugh when the pundits and journalists blather on about how this whole stinky Imus garbage pit has a positive side, in that it will "at last" open up a national dialogue about racism and intolerence. Yeah, right! Haven't they noticed there's been a dialogue going on for the past half century, and it's done nothing but get louder and more strident? And it's the very people who should lead the discussion in a sane, rational way that keep ratcheting up the volume. Unfortunately nobody will cop to being the least bit wrong. The hate-mongers manage to justify their irrational convictions and those who think they hold the keys to righteousness pick and choose their targets very carefully. The terrible fact the commentators and politicians and business honchos would prefer to avoid is that they're the very ones who've supported and encouraged Imus, snickering complicitly in public while they were cringing in private. This is a drug-addled ex-boozer who, if he weren't famous and started mouthing off at one of their cocktail parties, would never have been invited back. The same geniuses who're now calling for dialogue have all along been the secret champions of diatribe.
posted by John M Crowther @ 6:42 AM
14 Comments:
OK, I've thought about this for about an hour now, and I must concede victory. When the mom says, "it has nothing to do with when Santa goes ho, ho, ho". What is "it"? And what is Jeremy doing that he asks that question?
I must be missing something in the cartoon, but even after studying it carefully I don't know what.
thanks!
Hi, Kate. I bet if you asked your kids they could tell you. [grin]
I know and I don't even listen to Don Imus.lol The more i think about what happened to him-which he richly desrved- the more i conclude that it wasn't the language awful as it was but the target. Those girls hadn't done anything to warrant that kind of vituperation unlike the media and political types that were his usual target.roger
I had only kids under 11 today, and they had no clue either. I discourage watching TV. I don't think it's good for kids. I sometimes go for weeks without watching TV, or, for that matter, listening to the radio.
I didn't hear about the shooting in Virginia until my daughter got home and told me about it a few minutes ago. I get my news from the paper, which means I'm at least a day behind. Except for times like this, when I'm behind in my paper reading, which means I'm many days behind. I guess you can say it's not really news by the time I know about it.
Roger's post gave me my first clue. It has something to do with Don Imus; someone I'd never heard of until he said whatever it was he said. I don't even know what. I just know he was fired.
So I need to google that incident and see if I can figure out what's going on from that.
Believe me, Kate, you're so better off keeping yourself and your kids insulated from all this. I feel almost embarrassed to intrude on that enviable existence by dealing with it at all.
Kate... I wondered the same. I still don't get it... (even after the requisite google search) but maybe that's because (or in spite of) me being aussie! LOL
John... sounds as though I'd better google search events in Virginia. I have been mercifully protected from that also... (but not for long I guess)
Kate, Jean, "ho", ladies of the night, bad girls, etc. It took me a few minutes to get it as well.
Jeremy"s Mother needs to keep him away from TV. That child is entirely too smart for TV, says she grinning.
Can not believe what happened today in Virginia. God help us all.
Living in an artificially maintained environment has it's advantages, but it has a tendency to leave one woefully unprepared for dealing with "the real world". So I don't.
My eighteen year old daughter looked at the cartoon and thought "ho" was a play on "whore". Apparently that is a common word in today's culture. I've never actually heard anyone use it though. But that's about all she could tell me because she's almost as culturally illiterate as I am, thanks to my drug of choice: overprotective parenting.
I'll show it to my high school kids tomorrow. I'm sure one of them will be able to tell me what it means.
Sorry, John, for being so clueless!
Kate,
You’re daughter is etymologically correct. In North America the word “whore,” as it used in the “hood” (read neighborhood), is often shortened on rap records to a single syllable, whereas “ho” as Santa Claus exclaims it in the cartoon is usually used only to express surprise or joy, and on occasion to attract attention to something sighted, or to urge someone onward as in “Land ho! Westward ho!” Hence the youngster's confusion.
In the African-American community in Los Angeles, a westward ho is a prostitute who lives in Beverly Hills. Westward ho, ho, ho! would be three joyous prostitutes sharing a beach-house in Malibu.
I would also like to comment on the mother’s usage of “nappy,” North American maternal slang meaning a short sleep, usually during the day. The proper word “nap” from which “nappy” derives comes to us from the Middle English word “nappen” to doze. In ancient times the Upper English were said to “nappen” more often than Lower or Middle orders.
On the other hand, the mother may be asking her son to “nap,” i.e. "put on a diaper, a soft fabric." That usage comes to us from the Old English “hnæp” meaning a round, shallow cooking or serving dish with a flat bottom and sloping sides. In Old England the custom was that after a heavy meal and too many tankards of mead many a gentleman would “nappen” in his serving bowl.
Finally the mother may be using the word “nappy” correctly and adjectivically meaning “in small tight curls.” If she is, I have no idea for what purpose.
Oh, now I get it!
I looked up what Imus said, but it still didn't click until I read your lengthy explanation.
Thanks.
Thanks il prof... for your learned assessment and advice! LOL I had heard the term ho... but never for the life of me connected it to santa...(can't imagine why? duh! silly me LOL)
Actually it was the word nappy that had me really confounded. We don't use the word nap at all. Sleep is what we do when we put our head on the pippo! (Well some of us anyway... the others well.. I can't vouch for! lol) Here... a nappy is a baby's daiper... (short for napkin) How bizarre is that when you really think about it?
Why is so much of the American language going the way of African-American culture? It's happening here too to a lesser degree influenced by television and the media. Are we losing our British roots?
Jean asks
>>Why is so much of the American language going the way of African-American culture? It's happening here too to a lesser degree influenced by television and the media. Are we losing our British roots?<<
Jean,
Yes, we cannot discount the enormous effect African-American street culture has had on middle-class suburban teenagers with money in their pockets and not much sense in their heads: not only their clothes and music, but the very way young people today choose to speak.
Their goal --which is at best to be “cool” and at it’s worst, to behave like ”gangsta” drug-dealers and pimps-- is a total rejection of old-fashioned British manners and morality. Rather than looking up to the upper classes and copying their manner of life, as was the case in my father’s generation, it is now fashionable to look down at the ‘hood and aspire to behave as those at the very bottom of our society do.
It’s this foolish romance of poverty which is so depressing to some of us. Nostalgie de la boue, as the French describe it.
As the valet, Burrows, tells his film director boss in Preston Sturges’ masterpiece “Sullivan’s Travels”: “I have never been sympathetic to the caricaturing of the poor and needy, sir … The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous. You see, sir, rich people and theorists - who are usually rich people - think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches - as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned. “
Hear, hear!
Thanks you your assessment Il Prof :-)
>>Their goal --which is at best to be “cool” and at it’s worst, to behave like ”gangsta” drug-dealers and pimps--<<
It's really scarey when we this culture embedded through television into the psyche of youth in aboriginal communities like Wadeye in the Northern Territory... where gang violence has now become endemic. The influence certainly has a strong pull.
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