racial slurs

[Spyder73]

Originally Posted by Computer Man [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Why was the person who posted about the erudites banned?

Because this is a giant bait thread for that very outcome

[Wfrench1234]

You forgot assling for gnome

[Spyder73]

Plus it was Big J who ranks 10 out of 10 on the instability chart

[aMindAmok]

It's been my understanding that oriental describes a region of the world where as Asian is a race of people that might or might not come from an oriental location

[Spyder73]

The Orient as I have always understood it is the general area surrounding China. Basically like East of India and North of Australia sans Russia

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Spyder73 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The Orient as I have always understood it is the general area surrounding China. Basically like East of India and North of Australia sans Russia

That's actually only partly correct ... history lesson from professor Loramin inc ...

Prior to 1800 or so it actually referred to the Middle East (as that was as far East as Europeans went), in the 1800s it referred to India, and it wasn't until the 20th century that it got its current definition. Throughout that time it's always been kind of a loaded term, and a brilliant Palestinian writer named Edward Said wrote about this in his book Orientalism.

(Side note: Sayed, from Lost, was almost certainly based on him.)

Back in the day there were whole departments in European universities dedicated to studying "The Orient", and scholars wrote books about what a crazy place the Orient was. But because travel was dangerous back then, most of those scholars never actually visited, and even the ones who did didn't stay long. This resulted in a sort of echo chamber where a few guys would visit, get opinions based on brief stays (and their own preconceptions from reading other travel writing), and then others would read what they wrote and write still more books compounding the inaccuracies.

A perfect example of this was Marco Polo: if you actually read his writings he actually says stuff like "over there they have the dog-headed people." Obviously he never met those people, but he heard (mistranslated?) it from a local, wrote about it, and then people back in Europe blindly believed that there were dog-headed people in the Orient for awhile after.

But even without crazy distortions like that, "the Orient" was still falsely defined by Westerners, often to emphasize how different/foreign the East was. For instance, Europeans at the time were prude-ish and sex-starved, so when one of them saw a belly dancer or heard about a sultan's harem they fixated on it, wrote about it, got rewritten, and soon you had this idea that harems and belly dancers were all over the Middle East.

The same thing continued to happen throughout history, eg. with British colonials fixating on/misunderstanding the Indian practice of Sati. Or even today, try thinking about Vietnam: does the phrase "me love you long time", or perhaps dirty tricks with a ping pong ball come to mind? Now I'm not saying Vietnam doesn't have whores, but more that every country has whores, it's just that they make up a much bigger part of our perception of Vietnam than they should because a bunch of sex-starved soldiers in the 60s shaped our view of it.

Obviously the word "oriental" isn't directly to blame for all that, but it is tied together with a history of the West falsely understanding Eastern places, and as a result the term "Asian" (which doesn't have that baggage) has become more popular.

[stront]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That's actually only partly correct ... history lesson from professor Loramin inc ...

Prior to 1800 or so it actually referred to the Middle East (as that was as far East as Europeans went), in the 1800s it referred to India, and it wasn't until the 20th century that it got its current definition. Throughout that time it's always been kind of a loaded term, and a brilliant Palestinian writer named Edward Said wrote about this in his book Orientalism.

(Side note: Sayed, from Lost, was almost certainly based on him.)

Back in the day there were whole departments in European universities dedicated to studying "The Orient", and scholars wrote books about what a crazy place the Orient was. But because travel was dangerous back then, most of those scholars never actually visited, and even the ones who did didn't stay long. This resulted in a sort of echo chamber where a few guys would visit, get opinions based on brief stays (and their own preconceptions from reading other travel writing), and then others would read what they wrote and write still more books compounding the inaccuracies.

A perfect example of this was Marco Polo: if you actually read his writings he actually says stuff like "over there they have the dog-headed people." Obviously he never met those people, but he heard (mistranslated?) it from a local, wrote about it, and then people back in Europe blindly believed that there were dog-headed people in the Orient for awhile after.

But even without crazy distortions like that, "the Orient" was still falsely defined by Westerners, often to emphasize how different/foreign the East was. For instance, Europeans at the time were prude-ish and sex-starved, so when one of them saw a belly dancer or heard about a sultan's harem they fixated on it, wrote about it, got rewritten, and soon you had this idea that harems and belly dancers were all over the Middle East.

The same thing continued to happen throughout history, eg. with British colonials fixating on/misunderstanding the Indian practice of Sati. Or even today, try thinking about Vietnam: does the phrase "me love you long time", or perhaps dirty tricks with a ping pong ball come to mind? Now I'm not saying Vietnam doesn't have whores, but more that every country has whores, it's just that they make up a much bigger part of our perception of Vietnam than they should because a bunch of sex-starved soldiers in the 60s shaped our view of it.

Obviously the word "oriental" isn't directly to blame for all that, but it is tied together with a history of the West falsely understanding Eastern places, and as a result the term "Asian" (which doesn't have that baggage) has become more popular.

Nice post. Two things to add...
1.) Oriri means "to rise" in Latin, and as such, the Sun rose from the East...giving rise to the term. Interesting to think that they applied that phrase to the lands east of Byzantine?
2.) More off target, but as Marco Polo in your post mistranslated the dog head people....the Romans supposedly thought that Romulus and Remus were from wolves, but the same word for wolves, lupus, applies to prostitutes? I wonder how many other things propagated like this across time.

[kotton05]

gimme some good iksar slurs plz!

[kjs86z]

Originally Posted by kotton05 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

gimme some good iksar slurs plz!

Walking Salmonella

[katrik]

Hissyfit
Bug eater
Scale face