Text 9055, 90 rader
Skriven 2006-09-24 15:26:00 av Robert E Starr JR (9551.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Can You BELIEVE This?
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One post vanished into the ether - lets try again

<sigh> Taboo words.

Reading through this thread has some similarities to watching a 
slow-motion depiction of a traffic accident.  Thread drift is too mild a 
term.

"African American engineered" I could see was a euphamism, but it is a 
sloppy one, as it is still powerfully offensive. An effective euphamism 
neutralises the offensive image e.g. "she had to go to powder her nose" 
or "darn".

Nigger-rigged? Never heard it.  An obviously cobbled-together (oops!) 
slur; I would guess relatively recent since it implies contempt for a 
job done by an artisan based on colour, so there have to be significant 
numbers of coloured artisans competing for work in the marketplace to 
attract the slur.

The term has no currency in the UK and sounds like an American 
invention, since there the word "nigger" has its greatest potency, 
calling on echoes of slavery and the institutional racism it sired.

It most certainly isn't an engineering term.  I was an enjineer, but I 
was't good enough, so learned how to spell and became an project manager ;-)

Jury-rigged, of course, is not synonymous - a jury-rig is a temporary 
repair made with the limited materials to hand in order to keep things 
going until a permenant repair or replacement can be made - the origin 
is naval.

Jerry-built on the other hand means something deliberately built cheaply 
and hastily to maximise the builder's profit.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jur1.htm

And nothing to do with Jerry as a WWII contraction for German, familiar 
in the UK at least from the word jerrycan. (In the Western Desert, 
British Empire forces used simple unstiffened containers for fuel and 
water which often leaked.  The German pressed steel equivalent was far 
superior, and used in preference wherever it could be got.)

As for an alternative, I'd have used "bodged".  A slur on chair-bodgers, 
to be fair, but that occupation is now a historical curiosity and not 
current in peoples thinking.

The mention of Rube Goldberg had me heading for Google, where I find 
that in English it means Heath Robinson :-) :-) :-)

Taboo words exist because society somehow decides that some words are 
too offensive to be used in everyday conversation, because of the image 
they evoke in the mind of the listener.  The words don't disappear, they 
just go downmarket.  They still have currency, because every scale needs 
an 11 (obligitary Spinal Tap reference).

Usenet is an international forum, and taboos vary widely among its 
participants.  It is very difficult to avoid offending every possible 
member of the audience, and so each of us has to find their own level of 
moderation.

I once had a post edited

(edited! the moderator had changed my words! Unforgivable! Erase it, 
tell me why its wrong, but don't change my words)

on a web forum.  I had written "praised with faint damns" to indicate 
the particular kind of respect, pleasure and excitement evoked by my 
first encounter with Myst, I think - it was a Myst-related forum.  The 
moderator edited the damn to darn, I think, and cited a "no-swearing policy"

Where I come from "damn" isn't a swear word.  Alexander Pope obviously 
didn't think so, and nor did Shakespear come to that.

So how am I to avoid offending those English-speakers who consider 
"damn" a swear-word?  I'm afraid I don't - they fall on the wrong side 
of my line of moderation.

Taboo words exist and the list changes over time, with the language 
itself.  They will never go away, and each of us has to decide where to 
draw the line with respect to those we will use in a public place, such 
as Usenet.
                                                             
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