- Jun 10, 2017
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When a british say that he'll eat "fish and chips", and define the chips as being fried potato sticks. Will you say that he wrongly defined the word, or assume that the word probably doesn't mean the same for him and for you?Dude, you're making an excuse - not a reason. Yes, AON is from France - but he knew the term (even if he defined it in the wrong way)
I used, and defined, the word as it was intended for something like 40 years of my life. More, I used it as it was used by homosexuals/transgenders teenagers I talked with when I was a volunteer trying to help them. And I can assure you that there were no malice, and even less mischief intent, in their mind when they were using it; especially when they used it to define themselves. Some where girl, some where tall, some where shemale.
Now, yes, the word meaning changed in French since ~15 years, and apparently since way longer in US English. Should I have know it? Well, if I were still volunteering I would perhaps have noticed it. But like I'm not, and like I don't surround myself with short minded idiots that now use it as an insult, it was totally unnoticed to me.
It's like native from Lapland, "lappish"/"lapon"; both apparently are valid UK English translation.
Everyone used the word, or the equivalent in their language, for much more longer than my life. Yet it happen that it's an insult, the pejorative way used in the past in Finland to call those "uncivilized" peoples, based on a Finish word that have a meaning near to "rags".
A long long time ago, when foreigners came to Finland, they asked people, "hey, how do you call them", and they got an answer, that they translated in their language. Then people in their country started to use that word, centuries after centuries, unknowingly perpetuating the insult made to those people, unknowingly belittling them without ill intent in mind. Unlike in Finish at those time, in those languages the word mean "native people from Lapland", not "lousy peoples". Yet, using this word in place of "Sami" is offensive, right? Have you been unknowingly offensive all your life until now?
And there's thousand of cases like this, especially when it come to English, but not limited to it. All languages include foreign words, and their meaning isn't always the same than what it became in their original language; nor, like for my example above, does it have the same intent, and by there meaning, than in their original language.