So, for example, you can be "grandfathered in" to your cell phone plan, or excluded from the new restrictions of your employer's health insurance premiums due to the "grandfather clause." Sounds harmless, right? Well, it's not. In case you aren't familiar "grandfather clause," or the act of being " grandfathered in," Merriam-Webster defines it as "a part of a law which says that the law does not apply to certain people and things because of conditions that existed before the law was passed." It's a term that is, ironically enough, most often used in professional, business-type situations. And now that I know where it comes from, I feel pretty horrible about how cavalierly I've tossed it around in the past. Of all the phrases on this list, I have probably heard this one used, and used it myself, more than any of the others. Here are five common phrases used in Western culture that have some seriously messed-up, racist backgrounds. However, that's not an excuse to keep from learning and thinking about what the things we say really mean, and the cultural baggage attached to them. So we can forgive ourselves for not knowing the history of every single word and phrase we use. ("Slut" and "queer" are two such terms.)īasically, English is a tricky language, and I think anyone who speaks it understands that. And sometimes, more happily, the opposite happens, and once-bigoted phrases are reclaimed and used in positive ways by the very groups they were intended to marginalize. Sometimes a perfectly innocuous phrase can be utilized by racists for their horrible agenda, tainting it. Sometimes a word's troubling origins are forgotten. And sometimes, this means that certain terms and phrases can change their meaning over time. Of course, the nature of the English language (or any language, really) is that it's almost constantly changing. Over time, we forgot about those definitions, and have gone back to using the phrases as usual - but when we do so, we're carrying their secret racist history with us. While that's horrible, it's also not the end of the story - many common phrases we use every day, which did not have initially racist origins, were then repurposed to have racist meanings somewhere along the line. But what I didn't know until recently is that in the U.S., a lot of our most popular phrases have racist origins. Send us feedback about these examples.Have you ever used a common phrase, one you've heard a thousand times before, and suddenly wondered, "Where did that expression even come from, anyway?" I know I have. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tattletale.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2020 Was this really all in my head? *** Some families might demonize liars, or tattletales, or people who fall down on some other moral imperative. 2021 Kaila White, 29, also of Phoenix, was a good student and a tattletale while growing up. Lance Eliot, Forbes, 12 June 2021 The boy was branded as a tattletale for reporting what had happened to him and became the target of fierce bullying at school. Lance Eliot, Forbes, 23 June 2021 The odds are that once self-driving cars become prevalent, the general public will wise up that self-driving cars have this intrinsic capability of being a tattletale. 2020 Deciding to become a whistleblower requires some hefty thinking, trying to balance a personal sense of ethical codes versus the potential for being known as an informer or tattletale. 2023 One errant tweet, one mistimed joke, one honest opinion overheard by an oversensitive busybody with the shrunken soul of a schoolyard tattletale, and a person’s job can be lost and his reputation destroyed. Hazlitt, 26 July 2023 We’re basically guaranteed to see that thing where one person tells Zach that another person is there for the wrong reasons, but then the tattletale winds up consumed by their own vendetta and self-sabotages. Recent Examples on the Web The two of them, as though after a party, would have stood at the sink cleaning dishes and wondering which among the attendees was the traitor, the tattletale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |