-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 John Clizbe wrote: > The *only* way to get the pejorative connotation you refer to is to > conflate cryppy with the homophone you cite, crippie - something that > is a bit difficult to do via written text.
Or even in conversational speech. The contexts in which cryppies are talked about tend not to be the contexts in which crippies are talked about. This seems like a non-issue to me. English is full of homophonic collisions. Some people think the phrase "let's call a spade a spade" is racist, based on the word 'spade' being a racist epithet for people of a particular skin hue. This is despite the fact the phrase is a bad translation of a Greek proverb: "call a bowl a bowl". People have lost their jobs for describing their tendency towards parsimony as 'niggardly'. That phrase is of Old Norse origin, "hnøggr", meaning "stingy". It's in no way connected to an epithet. And so on, and so on, and so on. English takes words and proverbs from many different sources and conflates them all into one bizarre, counterintuitive, contralogical, colliding whole. (Consider that many consider it bad form to split an infinitive, but the word 'to' has as much relation to an infinitive as 'the' has to a nominative; so why is "to boldly go" considered verboten, while "the red car" is acceptable?) While I'm generally all in favor of being mindful of one's environment when selecting words, listeners have an equal obligation to be mindful of the flexibilities of language when deciding whether they ought be offended. So yeah, I'm with John: this is a nonissue. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (Darwin) iFYEAREKAAYFAkbgTO0ACgkQf2XByo0Cu7NJrgDfR6WRrbO3ZFJeUxV0mog2f7PC CqiBjPS73vECuADeI+EYUdd4akoiJvMz0jJAX3PHPUhux+zySuJXm4kBHAQBAQoA BgUCRuBM7QAKCRC3APSC/q+BCQKnCADC9gGZ52nAteHwLXEhzcYMCHjn0WVhxkcP IkfnFlGseQt9TaIa3z9DstkKa9CgsUMi/zViFEIdzFTHjJF2XbzsnQyO6vm1D0lO HjNeU/YbGWf7W82IiNffUT9N+65itwiy9FVC0bvI+LXcFKnILN8tDJZ3nlUtZpKf Yq3akMsJbDKyXDu1f/oR8gU/QiGdL/BiDS0Ih6SOzJ1ZmPVSLll3+wjYW0mWRJI0 1fEsWSChdc5KW+l0CRFZdft2Vioj0jgbHAgJUJxYcMD321xD9+OXMeIZunhQeBqA 18WV014qDVQfcxqPts3nhON57Dwm5S26iKp8wfoVqJpFj0emjKl0 =CwiN -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
