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Comment by mduncs | Hacker News Reader

Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym, so saying the Aloha shirt is a 'Hawaiian Shirt' is implying the shirt as part of native Hawaiian culture. What you say is technically true at a certain level, people who live in Hawaii do have the demonym of 'Hawaiian', but that term is reserved for the indigenous Polynesian people of Hawaii. It would seem odd to say for someone to say they enjoy native American food as a means of expressing their like of hamburgers and french fries.

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> Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym

I can understand this; at the same time, from my perspective, people use it to refer to the geographical state. So, not refering to a people at all, but a source of origin. Kind of like how I don’t assume Americans eat American food; i just assume I can find it in America.

That said, I did learn they are called aloha shirts and will make an effort to use that instead.

Anyone reading this article or talking about Hawaiian shirts is using Hawaiian colloquially. Maybe you live in a milieu where a distinction is necessary but for most people it just comes off as word policing.

The distinction of Hawaiian as a colloquial reference to anything from the state of Hawaii is made only outside of the state itself.

I can't change the way English itself works so there will always be that meaning, but to anyone from Hawaii, that distinction reminds us that native Hawaiians are distinct from the people of Hawaii today.

The Hawaiian culture has had its fair share of erasure and suppression. To make the distinction is an attempt to honor and remember the unique identity of native Hawaiians.

>Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym, so saying the Aloha shirt is a 'Hawaiian Shirt' is implying the shirt as part of native Hawaiian culture.

I'm not sure people outside of Hawaii mistakenly link the "Hawaiian shirt" to _native_ Hawaiian culture. (The "native" modifier is key here for clear discussion.)

Instead, "Hawaiian shirt" is more innocently used as "a shirt common in the geographical place of Hawaii". If you really tried to get outsiders to picture a _native_ Hawaiian culture, they might imagine shirtless Polynesian people like these images.[1] Those people are not wearing the touristy floral printed shirts that are sold as "Hawaiian shirts".

>The Hawaiian culture has had its fair share of erasure and suppression. To make the distinction is an attempt to honor and remember the unique identity of native Hawaiians.

I'm still confused why the label "Hawaiian shirt" is erasing _native_ Hawaiian culture.

If Europeans choose to label what USA citizens call "football" as "American football", they do not imply that everybody links these images[2] to _native_ American culture. No matter how many times Europeans repeat the phrase "American football", these images of native Americans[3] will always be a separate and preserved concept in their minds.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=polynesian+people&source=lnm...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=nfl+football&source=lnms&tbm...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=native+americans&source=lnms...

Yeah, its tough to understand how people think of a word on a case to case basis. Everyone will have different connotations. There is murkiness that exists as part of its use as a noun or an adjective.

My point of erasure relates to making the use of Hawaiian as a noun specifically relating to anything native Hawaiian.

The football thing doesn't feel entirely on point for me, an analogy of Europeans seeing Tex-Mex and calling it Mexican food seems closer to the idea. It is technically right, but some people from Mexico would disagree with that being _real_ Mexican food.

As an aside, those you refer to as "indigenous Polynesian people" are actually a later wave of Tahitian colonists who conquered and oppressed the previous settlers from the Marquesas Islands.

http://www.waimea.com/people.html

So it's not automatic that this particular wave of settlers uniquely deserves to be called "Hawaiian".

While again being technically true, I would love to see any white or asian immigrants noting the ethnography of the original Hawaiian people in the time where they first made contact with and lived among the Hawaiian people.

By the time of Kamehameha, I was taught there was a unified monolithic Hawaiian culture.

Who are "the original Hawaiian people"? Tahitians? Marquesans? Society Islanders?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_settlement_of_Ha...

Does it actually matter whose ancestors colonized first? What's the difference between Hawaii's colonization by ethnic Tahitians and North America's colonization by ethnic English?

But it's not called a native Hawaiian shirt. Hawaiian culture didn't end in 1778.

Hawaii post-Cook ended up losing a lot of its population, because of that and other immigration it began to lose its culture. Other culture loss came fron Westernization and Christianity (Missionaries), the Hawaiian language itself was on the decline because of suppression until a renaissance in the 1970s.

The distinction of Hawaiian in reference to native people is a only made off the islands. To anyone from Hawaii or familiar with it calling it a Hawaiian shirt literally is wrong in our understanding of the word.

To try and spread that understanding of Hawaiian as reference to native peoples is to spread the knowledge that Hawaii is a multiethnic place with distinct native culture alongside its American, Asian and other Polynesian influences.

>The distinction of Hawaiian in reference to native people is a only made off the islands. To anyone from Hawaii or familiar with it calling it a Hawaiian shirt literally is wrong in our understanding of the word.

Well, 8 billion people live outside the islands. Their use of the word will prevail for an object that's available everywhere in the world.

That's a fine distinction, but what word would you use to describe something that's a product of Hawaii but not ethically Polynesian? Like Hawaiian pineapples, or loco moco? On the islands you could just call it "local" but on the mainland that wouldn't make any sense.

One answer is undeniably clunky, "these pineapples are from Hawaii."

The AP's style guide uses Hawaiian as an adjective.

It is a messy thing when typical ways of speaking English conflict with nuances.

If you can't suggest a better word than "Hawaiian" when someone wants to say an adjective meaning "from Hawaii", perhaps you should keep your peace?

Hawaiian will continued to be used as an adjective.

And additionally better isn't always the most succinct. I use Hawaii resident or kamaaina to say I'm from Hawaii, I don't call myself Hawaiian.

The person I first responded to called the shirt 'as genuinely Hawaiian...', which while true to describe its geographic origin, carries a different connotation. I think I made that point clear.

I don't think we'll get too much more understanding arguing points of grammar, you have a fair point with using Hawaiian as adjective. Thanks for the discussion.

It's interesting that "Hawaiian" has a different meaning on the islands, and that people might not say "Hawaiian shirt" there just like people don't say "French bread" in France. However, pointing out supposed insensitivity to ethnic groups is pretty much the main hobbyhorse of moralizing busybodies the world over in 2018, and unlikely to win you much affection. It's got to the point where the phrase "the n-word" strikes one as unseemly, and we'll start saying "the word that starts with the letter that comes after 'M'".

>Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym, so saying the Aloha shirt is a 'Hawaiian Shirt' is implying the shirt as part of native Hawaiian culture.

Well, they wear a lot in Hawaii, so... Native Hawaiian culture didn't stop with Columbus...

> Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym

Even if so (and I think that's iffy), “primarily” is not the same as “exclusively”.

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