Sunday, August 9, 2020

dear MAORI, please don’t name your kids DICK because you will be appropriating an English word AND offending English-speakers world wide

Just like the English, sometimes the Maori also use the word for bush to mean something sexual : OMG, we are both fellow human beings after all !
Just like the word pussy in English, which has both a dictionary cum Sunday School meaning in English along with a more informal and taboo meaning, the Maori word huruhuru has both polite and less polite meanings.

This has gotten two businesses in trouble with a few self-publicizing WOKE Maori people, because the businesses consulted online dictionaries when creating new products, without looking further down the computer screen to discover that the word huruhuru also had some additional - rude - meanings.

And who says the oppressed of this world lack a sense of humour and a sense of irony : these Maori Awoke chose to tell the English that they are using the Maori language without permission - in  English  !

English is the world’s most successful language around the world because it had been the most relaxed as stealing and appropriating words and concepts from other people’s languages to expand its own ability to better communicate the smallest concepts of existence.

By contrast, languages from political cultures that insist on using no ‘borrow’ words (theft words, appropriating words) are bulky languages : they insist on explaining a new concept within the word itself, using their only their small ancient existing vocabulary.

In English, we must painfully memorize that the borrow word ski means, well a ski.

In a language like Icelandic, they would tend to call it something like “thin-sticks-to-glide-over-snow”.

I personally who prefer to live in a world where all languages freely stole and then adapted each other’s languages to the mutual enrichment for all.

If English cum Anglo- Saxons gave back all the words they stole - from the Greeks and Latins ever onwards, we’d be reduced to a mere few thousand Anglo-Saxon words that no one could spell or pronounce right, let along use right.

Words are exactly like the humble Nova Scotian earthworm - everyone loves them and wants more of them in their garden, but the plain awkward fact is that they are not native but an European invasive species  - as are all white Nova Scotians.

We humans have been invasive species ever since we crawled out of some remote little rift valley and started into invading Africa before taking on the whole world.

Instead of apologizing, both businesses should go on using these words in their more official dictionary meanings while telling these WOKE Maori to go Richard themselves in their Huruhuru where the sun never shines.....

5 comments:

  1. Invasive species? Yeah if you view easter Island as a microcosm of planet earth we might be in trouble. Sure you're familiar with how the inhabitants got into an arm's race trying to build larger and larger stone heads until they deforested the island making long roads of fallen trees to roll these rocks across. Well, no trees means eventually no canoes to hunt porpoise or dolphins.(Whichever it was) The descent into cannibalism abd starvation should be a lesson to the rest of us. Bringing that or the crow creek massacre up gets one into trouble nowadays I've found. So much for that thriving forest ecosystem. Let's not mistake that religion and the worship of stone heads was certainly important but in a bigger way these stone heads were like neighbor's today trying to "out-do" the other. Giant pools, bigger and bigger mansions etc. Humans are invasive in a special way the competition between us leads to pyramids, giant stone heads, just exponential destruction in an endless cold war to prove whose top dog. This had worth in the hunter gatherer societies where people spent 99.9% of our time as a species, now we're just out of control.

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  2. You seem like a fellow who would love Steven Pinker's work. The stuff of thought chapter 7 "the seven words you can't say on TV" and his articles on the euphemism treadmill. I kind of assumed maybe you have already read this stuff with how well you write on the subject of language. Anyway these words are offensive but every child uses the phrasing "scum bag" thats original meaning is exactly what it sounds like: a discarded condom.

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  3. "Fuck the titmouse. Me and my buddies are the species that
    need to be protected. We need a natural habitat,a place to call our own,a place where we're safe. A place off your streets where we can listen to Frank and get our drink on." - Richard "Fitz" Fitzpatrick (call me fitz, season 3)

    This blog post about language and invasive species brought this Canadian television reference to mind.

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  4. no the wortmans came to moncton 250 years ago from germany - his faith was anglican i believe - his mom rc...

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