Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge | Hacker News Reader

Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

568 pointsnojs508 comments

So in Korean, the word for "you" is 니가 (pronounced "nee-gah"). Example usage: 니가 언제 먹었어요? (When did you eat? "Nee-gah un-jeh mug-uss-uh-yo") I can't help but wonder if the use of this word would also elicit a similar reaction...

EDIT: I briefly forgot this, but there is a similar Korean word "내가" which is "me" or "I", and pronounced "ne-gah". Example usage: 내가 이 밥을 먹었어요. (I ate this food. "Ne-ga ee bap-uhl mug-uss-uh-yo")

EDIT2: Korean is not my native language so forgive me for this, but "you" is usually just 니 ("nee"), and "me" or "I" is just 내 ("ne"), but the 가 ("gah") part is used like a conjunction to connect to the rest of the phrase.

EDIT3: Ok, so I talked with a better Korean speaker about this and 니가 "nee-ga" is sort of a regional dialect (kind of like a slang term) for 너가 "nuh-ga". 니가 "nee-ga" is more commonly used in southern parts of South Korea, as the proper way of saying/spelling "you" is 너가 "nuh-ga". My Korean is influenced with the southern regional dialect as my parents were from that region. Sorry for the possible confusion. (So just "you" is 너 "nuh".)

EDIT4: PSY (of Gangnam Style fame) has a song titled "Champion" that uses 니가 "nee-ga" a lot:https://youtu.be/uA4fV7Y14eg?t=49

Here's a fight(more like an assault on the elderly) that broke out between a black American on a South Korean bus because the elderly people, who probably don't speak a word of English or know English racial slurs, referred to him as "you" in their own language in their own country: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/88xlz4/a_bl...

Black fragility.

Probably not. The difference in vowel sounds, timing and intonation don't give it the same feel. It's pretty noticable when you hear Mandarin spoken because the word is usually spoken pretty quickly then the speaker trails off because they're thinking of what to say... Sometimes they say it two or three times on a row. So it really stands out.

Yeah https://youtu.be/s_jWTrRguzU

Of course they would, dropped into a communication course with no prior warning.

If it was a German professor talking about buttermilk do you think he would given a build up?

"You" and "me" are pronunced "nee-gah" and "ne-gah"? Those sound very similar, does that ever lead to misunderstandings?

I know nothing about the language being discussed here, but the answer is no, it doesn't lead to misunderstandings. How do I know this? Because it's a natural language. The language exists for no reason other than the fact that it works. If the words sounded exactly the same you could safely assume that they either communicate the difference some other way, or the difference simply does not matter to them.

An example of communicating something in a different way would be how in Spanish the pronoun is completely dropped in most cases. This is because it's completely redundant as the verb will be conjugated to include the pronoun.

An example of things not mattering is in English where we don't distinguish between rivers that flow into other rivers and rivers that flow into the sea. French speakers might be confused (how do you know whether it's a fleuve or a rivière?), but the answer is we simply don't care.

When learning a natural language, always assume that it works for them. Your aim is not to be able to translate your language to theirs, it is to be able to communicate your thoughts into their minds. Keep an open mind about what's important to transfer and how this can happen.

I just popped 'em both into Google Translate to have the machine pronounce them for me.

I speak no Korean at all, but had no trouble telling them apart. Speakers of the language will undoubtedly be more competent than me.

https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...

In Korean, the vowels ㅣ (ee sound) and ㅐ (eh sound) are different in the written language. There are actually more difficult things such as ㅐ and ㅔ (both "eh" sound) which can get confusing when trying to spell Korean words. In practice, I personally don't get confused differentiating between "nee-gah" and "ne-gah", but that may have been due to me having Korean parents and being used to that terminology since birth.

Do you ever misunderstand dean and den?

Oof, we better fire all Korean professors. /s

Asian's receive an enormous amount of hate from the African American community.

...so I would not be surprised to see that at some point happen at a real university.

At RPI, the number of Asian professors and students plummeted after Shirley Ann Jackson took over.

Just from watching that lecture - he seems like a genuinely good professor. He provided tons of context before he introduced that example, and it's a real-world example from a language that nearly a billion humans speak. By choosing an example that is from a language that is foreign to most of his students - he's helping his students understand that the actual concept he's teaching is not just an english linguistic feature or a western-centric mannerism - it's a communication pattern that occurs widely.

I feel bad for the future UCS students who will miss out on his class. I also wonder to what degree this decision will have a chilling effect on the content of other lecturers at UCS. Could history professors see this as a reason to exclude primary content that reflects the racist realities of the past? Or maybe music professors will reconsider whether they can teach the work of artists who might be cultural appropriation? It's hard to say.

I hope that another university makes this professor a job offer - or at least speaks out in support of his teaching. This seems so bizarre that I can only reckon with it by imagining it's a west-coast cultural phenomenon. I certainly wouldn't imagine this going down the same way in my home state (North Carolina) - but maybe I'm underestimating how pervasive this extreme sensitivity trend really is. There WAS an incident with a professor who got suspended at NC State recently ( https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article235... ) but in that case - the professor was publicly mocking his students in a way that may or may not have been interpreted as sexist. Even if the suspension for that scenario actually overkill (which I think it was) - it seems crazy pants to put the professor who was thoughtfully teaching a lecture in the same category as one who gets a kick out of insulting students for laughs.

Again, context is everything. What an utterly spineless, pathetic response from a risk averse management type - to throw their colleague under the bus.

> Again, context is everything.

Exactly. Otherwise it is nothing more than a politically correct reaction to everything that moves in the direction of what they think is 'offensive'. Even if it unintentionally "sounds" like it.

For the professor there is no 'Please, I can explain...' and there is no redemption. Instantly found guilty. This is the clownworld order folks.

Cancel culture is just getting started. What began on Twitter has been moving into HR departments and school administrations around the country.

I did some Chinese courses last year and "na ge" is something that will get repeated frequently because of how Chinese make their sentences. There is another one "nei ge". They are an important part of the Chinese language.

Edit: just watched the video. He was not teaching a chinese course. A bit of a suspicious example he picked if you ask me.

On the other hand, if you're an African American doing a business deal in China, it is also almost certainly the best example, and might genuinely be the most valuable thing that you take away from that class. Specifically, "sometimes people speaking Mandarin say something that sounds like 'ni__er'. It is not actually 'ni__er', and is completely unrelated to my race."

That could easily be the difference between "deal" and "end of relationship".

He was teaching a communications class and was currently discussing filler worlds in various languages. Sounds completely on-topic to me.

It is not necessarily spineless. These types thrive on "divide et impera" and occasionally ruining other people's lives.

It is all they can do.

The only way to solve that problem is to create risk for the spineless behavior.

> "...utterly spineless, pathetic response from a risk averse management type..."

the same thing happens with the corona responses of universities. colleges could open with distancing rules, sensible mask usage (inside, not outside), testing, and swift quarantine. that would basically eliminate spread in the learning environment.

the problem, of course, is outside the learning environment, where students will inevitably let their guards down and mix unsafely, but that's not the purview of the university. these are (young) adults, and the university's responsibilities end at the campus edge. what the university can do is refuse access to the infected on campus (in conjunction with plentiful testing), and provide swift and compassionate support for students who do get infected (and can't come on campus), without overstepping into paternalism.

then the responsible students will have access to the education they desire (and paid for), while the irresponsible will be denied (temporarily, likely having to repeat a semester or even a year). this will incentivize good behavior without resorting to autocratic mismanagement like this.

> "Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better."

It's unbelievable that this "understandably" caused pain to anyone. There is a linked recording of him using the term. Not only does this barely resemble the racial slur, it is indistinguishably used in a context where it's implicitly clear and even explicitly stated that it's a term from another language.

The dean and faculty should stand behind the professor and educate whoever got upset about this that you can not expect punishment for obvious misunderstandings.

Also, it might be really helpful to add (nà ge) to the title as it's impossible to make out the essence of the article for anyone who doesn't know the logographics.

I think that microaggressions are real, that language really has import, and I've been noticing those kinds of things more and more on a daily basis. But this is entirely unwarranted and a gross overreaction.

Having said that, I also understand the terror that this kind of issue generates in organisations. Imagine you're the dean of an institution in an environment where people only read the headlines in their Facebook news feeds. I can easily imagine the headline "Marshall School of Business refuses to discipline lecturer who repeatedly said the n-word in class" followed by a dissembling write-up of angry students and vague mentions of the fact it wasn't intentional. This kind of thing can turn into a reputational firestorm and do real long-term damage to student recruitment.

Deans of educational institutions are between a rock and a hard place. If they were in charge of the narrative, it would be possible to be reasonable and say "This wasn't something to be upset about, and here's why". But they rarely are in charge of the narrative and want to shut these issues down as quickly as possible.

I can imagine a reasonable way forward might be to get the students and lecturer together to talk over the issues, and have a nuanced discussion about differing languages, much like what's happening in some of the comments here. But by the time you've organised that the firestorm is well underway and the damage is already done.

This seems like a perfect example of why micro-aggressions are bullshit. Any right-thinking person can see that those taking offence to this are wrong, while the theory of micro-aggressions posits that because they are offended their feelings are valid and the professor must be in the wrong.

But that kind of controversy is supposed to be a good thing for universities! I'm not saying you're wrong as a matter of organizational dynamics, but it reads to me like an explanation of why a liquor store owner might prefer to only sell soft drinks. What's the point of a university where ideas can't be freely discussed?

If they are really worried about such headlines, I can tell you the next escalation level: geography lecturer dismissed because of using an N word (northpol)

Yup, this "excuse letter" looks exactly like what a victim of a sham trial would write under Stalin or Mao. This is frightening.

> this "excuse letter" looks exactly like what a victim of a sham trial would write

As far as I see the letter behind the link was written by the "judge" in this "trial": "Geoff Garrett, Dean" -- it's he who wrote:

"Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students."

Sounds very similar! Say no more!

This is hardly surprising. We used to have lots of civil social discourse. Media, elites, and intellectuals would engage in such discourse and would present sometimes opposing thoughts. Only with such discourse will there be no room for radicals. And look what's been happening, moderates of a few years ago would be considered far-right today. Anyone with different opinions, now matter what reasons they offer, will be labeled with the usual: bigot, racist, fascist, and xenophobia. Media like WaPo and NYT and CNN published all kinds of articles that argue XXX is racism, like milk, like maths, like interior design.

It's a matter of time we got into this hysteria.

I think you're making your own counterargument: if you prioritize civil discourse, you necessarily exclude radicals - you've limited the space of discourse by insisting that the only acceptable propositions are those that people can reliably be civil about. Fewer people were making extreme claims, but many of those extreme claims could have been debated rationally, were people interested in doing so. It is a Potemkin discourse: it looks very peaceful and respectable, but it looks that way because it's artificially removed from actually discussing the state of our society.

So, I am happy to engage you in debate, and I'll even do your job for you by trying to precisely name the propositions that you think are so obviously incorrect.

Most of the hits I see for "milk is racist" is about the alt-right using milk drinking as essentially an aesthetic symbol, which seems like a) a factual observation b) not a claim about milk itself being racist, but about its adoption as a racist symbol.

I see a 2016 CNN article called "math is racist," which, if you read it, is clearly arguing that mathematical models are being used in ways that reinforce racism, not that the brute facts of mathematics are themselves racist, either. This argument is generally widely accepted, so I'm curious if you disagree with it.

I can't find any articles about interior design being racist, but I do see articles about the interior design industry confronting race problems. This doesn't sound surprising or extreme either - I'd expect that most industries have race problems of some sort.

You'll note that I have not called you bigot, racist, fascist, nor xenophobia [sic], and I'd appreciate if you returned the favor and engaged my arguments on the merits.

>Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students

Why, aren't they adults? (Over 17 will do in most countries to consider them so).

There's a common strain of thought in the US that it's actually a sign of maturity to be pained and upset by words. Immature people, the theory goes, don't have enough empathy to understand why a common word in a foreign language could be so hurtful.

For all we know, this could be a disaffected student seeing an easy way to get revenge for not being given the grade they want.

Seems like their current system makes that all too easy.

Also, sounds very open to potential blackmailing of people. :(

To have Prof. Patton suspend for this, I'd argue this has cause great pain to Chinese speaker to see a legitimate phrase, correctly used and taught (by a foreigner no less), be deemed racially inflammatory, with the Prof. suspended.

I'm not gonna lie, my blood boiled over this one.

Acts like these set precedent for future actions by colleges across the spectrum.

The Coddling of the American Mind is good deep dive on this and helps explain the phenomenon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076NVFT5P/

> Not only does this barely resemble the racial slur, it is indistinguishably used in a context where it's implicitly clear and even explicitly stated that it's a term from another language.

In the linked video it sounds exactly like the slur, To a surprising extent.

It was introduced with no warning and I’m not surprised people were shocked if this was the same context as the class - although we don’t know the full details!

I’d be surprised just to hear a word sounding like “fuck” in the middle of a chinese class, although it’s probably not considered as offensive.

It doesnt surprise me at all that some people were upset and it seems very unwise on the part of the professor, who would surely know that this would provoke a reaction. A suspension from teaching his one class for a term will defuse the situation and perhaps he can return to teaching after.

>It was introduced with no warning and I’m not surprised people were shocked if this was the same context as the class - although we don’t know the full details!

What possible other details could there be? We literally have the recording of what happened before. He explains that there is a filler word in chinese, gives the english translation and then the chinese word. Do you really think it's reasonable to expect an additional warning? Should every philosophy lecture come with a short preface that the word 'Kant' may come up and is not intended to cause any harm? (mind you, the dean's letter is actually way more strict: it literally straight up says that these words are 'unacceptable', no qualification about a warning or anything).

Hell, how far do you think this should go? If a student has a potentially offensive sounding name, do they have to give a warning before they introduce themselves? Or should they have to anglicize their name?

In the video it was clearly preceded by "in Chinese". And he was talking the whole time about filler worlds. Clearly, context has been established. And the audience of a communications class at university level can be expected to understand that other languages contain words that might sound offensive to English native speakers. Do people really think Prof. Patton intended to insult people of color, in an online class? Are people really getting offended when Chinese use 那个, or when they overhear Russians discuss кни́ги? Will I get censored for merely mentioning these words and not child-proofing my post with "warning: words in this post might be considered offensive"?

Reminds me of this (2011):

https://www.amren.com/news/2011/08/foreigner_on_ko/

> “A video is circulating on the Korean Internet of a black gentleman yelling at and threatening an elderly Korean couple. His violent behavior was the result of him misunderstanding the elderly man’s comment to him. The elderly man reportedly said “니가 여기 앉아” (a sign of consideration) (“You can sit here” = Niga Yuh gi anja”), but not knowing Korean, the man in question interpreted “니가” as the N-word which led to his violent outburst.

This doesn't make sense to me at all.

Like.. in Spanish the word "negro" is "black". Can Spanish teachers now no longer use that word? Crazy.

It's like when chat filters (e.g in games) censor words based on the 'English' language. When I chat in dutch / flemish, my friends just see me censored for quite common words in our language. And they're often not even spelled the same as the English word that is bad.

> It's like when chat filters (e.g in games) censor words based on the 'English' language. When I chat in dutch / flemish, my friends just see me censored for quite common words in our language.

I'm Dutch and play AoE2 with some friends. The in game chat is basically useless for us. Just about every Dutch sentence will be blocked.

We tried switching to English, but every color (!) is now also banned. Asking "who is joining the blue team?" will become censored... Good job Microsoft.

You're reminding me of the Swedish word for terminus station: https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...

Two countries in the world are called Niger and Nigeria. Shall we stop talking about those countries too?

From what I can tell, those countries are now racist based on their names and should be fired.

History books should be burned.

No human should ever speak to another human again.

But we all need to be in offices in close quarters once the pandemic ends, so that we can fire each other for accidental using the word "she" in a conversation.

25 years ago (give or take), a man filed a lawsuit against Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia. He was helping his son write a report on Niger but accidentally added a letter. The emotional distress it caused to him and his son led to the lawsuit.

TL;DR: There is nothing new under the sun.

For fucks sake. This sort dumbarse action sets back the cause of equality by a country fucking mile. This stuff happens when you take Dr DiAngelo too seriously and ignore what minorities are saying and just go with your ill informed guilt ridden heart.

Clearly he wasn't saying what is implied. I had assumed that "nà ge" was a slur in mandarin(when I saw the original news report). Its 100% clear from context that its nothing to do with race. Whats more the context is directly linked to the three words he says.

We must strive for equality, We _must_ help wider society by lifting up minorities.

This does not achieve this, in fact it will embolden the dickheads who want to make this a "thing" (SEE! "they" want to undermine us etc etc etc)

' who want to make this a "thing" '

Clearly it is a thing, why pretend otherwise? If this were some extremely small minority, it would not have such widespread cultural influence now. It is a thing.

I should clarify: by "thing" I mean "see this is why the [minority] are anti american. lets punish them for not being grateful"

I strongly suspect that this decision was not made by someone from the affected minority, so it seems unfair for them to shoulder the blame.

I'd bet big money that even DiAngelo would not find that lecture offensive in any way.

Nor does she advocate for retribution when unintentional slights happen. In her online lectures, she tells a story of how she offended some Black colleagues by making a silly joke. She apologized and they came to an understanding that the colleague would help keep her in-check when it happens again and they carried on.

Some time ago a fellow countryman, a basketball player, made it into NBA. After a controversial ruling by a judge that one of his teammates performed a foul, he kept yelling "ni ga, ni ga, ni ga". Contextually translated, he meant "he hadn't touched him".

He had to apologize profusely and explain to no end what he meant. Regardless, his career was soon over after that.

We, non-native speakers, must be really careful about using words in our own language that may sound offensive in the other language. What a world we created :(

I'd like to read more about this incident.

Which country? Do you have a link to any article on this? Or a name I can search for?

Sorry, cannot find any news remaining on the web regarding the incident. I suppose the reason is that it was some time ago.

The basketball player in question was Marko Milič: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marko_Milič

>We, non-native speakers, must be really careful about using words in our own language that may sound offensive in the other language. What a world we created :(

And it's in English as well. Growing up in Europe but heavily influenced by American Music, Movies, TV and Internet one grows up thinking that N----- or Nigga is fine to use. You hear it all the time, especially in music.

Couple that with the fact that we don't really have "career-ending words" in Europe and it leads to a lot of awkward moments. You can't even say the word, and Americans tend to censor the word even when anonymously typing it online. I did because this is an American forum, but it's really weird to see to be honest. You can't even say the word as part of a debate over the word.

A while back a Dutch coach was forced to resign after using the word because it was in a song: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/18/fc-cincinna...

The fact that you aren't even allowed to sing along with a song without muting yourself on certain words that the singer sings anyway... it's just mind boggling to me...

Yeah, I also noticed that Americans tend to handle every taboo word like "Voldemort". From when I was kid I always found it so odd how Americans use all of these one-letter variants of their taboo words (n-word, f-word, etc) even when everyone involved in the conversation is an adult and should be able to handle a bad word. It's one of the weirdest parts of their culture to me.

> You can't even say the word as part of a debate over the word.

The Wikipedia entry explains the historical context of why the word is so extremely painful - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger

One way to think about it is that there's almost no context where it would be constructive for a non-Black person to use the word (including singing a song, for example). Why? Because there is not a way to neutralize the emotion and history behind the word in any context. That's why the n-word euphemism was created and is the norm. It provides an acceptable replacement. When someone violates this norm, it creates resentment, intense frustration, and great offense for a large group.

> A while back a Dutch coach was forced to resign after using the word because it was in a song: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/18/fc-cincinna.... > The fact that you aren't even allowed to sing along with a song without muting yourself on certain words that the singer sings anyway... it's just mind boggling to me...

From the article (emphasis mine): "Jans is alleged to have used the slur while singing along to a track being played in the Cincinnati locker room. A player is understood to have told Jans, who is Dutch, about the significance of the n-word in America. Jans is also understood to have made an inappropriate remark about slavery during a team visit to memorials in Washington DC in October.

I do not know what the details are around "inappropriate remark about slavery", but if I was a player (esp. a black player), I would find it difficult to respect that coach.

It is really weird that this one word can't be said, even as a quote, even when invited on stage to sing a song by the original performer.

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-44209141

Honestly, I'm shocked everytime I read this stuff from american universities.

Why is this happening? Because it's not the first nor second time that I read about events similar to this one.

It is happening because of power. Students have found that they can bully professors and administrators, and bend them to their personal beliefs. It's a sense of power that, like most forms of power, becomes very intoxicating.

Just like a two-year old enjoys their newfound power over their parents by screaming in public until they are appeased.

So too do students with authority issues enjoy exerting newfound power over the authorities they oppose by complaining to their risk-averse boss.

> Why is this happening?

This specific case, I would bet dollars to donuts, happened because: (1) The administration is hypersensitive in light of the wave of race related protests and associated two-sided violence occurring in the country. (2) Someone aware of the likelihood of that deliberately trolled the administration, probably under a false flag, to produce an incident.

Possibly just for lulz, more likely than that in the hopes of benefiting a particular domestic political faction, but even money it was done on behalf of (though not necessarily at the direction of) a foreign power.

I also thought it might have been trolling, but this article makes that seem unlikely: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-05/usc-busi...

To some students, the word sounded like the N-word in English. The next day a group of Black master’s candidates in the class of 2022 wrote a letter to Marshall Dean Geoffrey Garrett.

“There are over 10,000 characters in the Chinese written language and to use this phrase ... is hurtful and unacceptable to our USC Marshall community,” the letter said. “The negligence and disregard displayed by our professor was very clear.”

even money it was done on behalf of (though not necessarily at the direction of) a foreign power.

Why on earth would you assume that? What are the relatively likelihoods of it being Satanists, alien mind-worms or Marxist-Feminists versus an agent of a foreign power?

Probably because the Students are the paying Customers and not Students in a Government sponsored Institution, you don't want to loose customers so you fire the employee (just a theory)

The thing that gets me is that a university is a place for learning and exploration of the world. If everyone at a university is afraid of getting reprimanded for what at most was a misunderstanding, then where exactly can we expect to tackle the hard challenges of racism and sexism? Obviously we shouldn't accept people being racist or sexist at these places, but we need to provide the space to allow for the difficult conversations without the risk of being "cancelled" for making a mistake. If you cannot, then the concept of academia is pretty much dead.

The leadership is afraid of getting canceled themselves by not acting concerned enough, so they try to save their asses by running in front. Just a way to hold on to one's job in the current environment. I don't think they are true believers.

Cancel culture's greatest achievement is creating just enough fear that non-believers will volunteer to do their dirty work - even without being asked.

I think this is the right answer. The previous dean was fired due to having a high number of discrimination complaints in the business school while he was in charge. Even though IIRC something like 95% of the complaints were deemed to be unwarranted

Because you have a wave of far leftest SJW activity that is sheltering people from any critical thinking, making "safe spaces" where people become too fragile to engage with anyone of differing or opposing ideologies. Disengaging the context of words and giving them absolute meanings (e.g. the entire master/slave fiasco, as if the words "master" and "slave" or others have inherent evil, as opposed to the context they're used in, or the case with the Chinese word used here in the article).

>>Why is this happening?

Cancel Culture.

As much as I totally understand the downvoting of this comment, it unfortunately isn't entirely wrong. I desperately want to be an all-in liberal person, and I would rather not have stock phrases in existence that can be misappropriated by the Donald Trump / Katie Hopkins' of the world, but with any knee-jerk reaction from humans there are people who take them to extremes, and this story is one of an increasing number of examples.

Thankfully, we have a media source that is willing to call out stupid examples of suffocating over-liberalism. Most other people don't, all their news is being filtered by traditional (and clickbait) media, and fewer and fewer people are actually looking to get the real story from the primary sources.

That said, I don't think this particular moniker is going to help much. It's already been polluted.

> Why is this happening?

One word: lawsuits. And the unpredictability of juries.

>lawsuits

on what grounds?

>And the unpredictability of juries.

AFAIK if you're the defendant you can opt for trial by judge rather than trial by jury.

How many times have you read a story like this? Like 5 times in the last 10 years? It gets a lot of headlines because it's ridiculous, but it isn't common.

WTF. There's is literally a stand-up skit[0] on this. Moreover, any quick research would show it's the Mandarin filler word. Plus, I dunno, just ask the other Mandarin-speaking faculties and students?

Do you know the number 99 (nine-nine) sounds like the derogatory term for mammary glands in Mandarin? Are they going to redact every instance of the number on campus, on grounds of potential sexual harassment?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsWp07BwVk

They didnt have to ask mandarin speakers. The admin agree that it is a mandarin word, but that understandably people got upset because it sounds like an US slur.

> understandably

That's far from understandable for the majority of commenters in this thread, myself included.

This word means "uhmm" and you can hear it dozens of times in a single conversation.

It sounds like an English-language racial slur, but you stop being surprised to hear it pretty quickly when living in China. The story isn't loading for me, so I don't know the context, if this was a native Mandarin speaker speaking in Mandarin...

Reminds me of the time someone pointed out that "salut" the french for "hi" sounds like "stupid donkey" in Mandarin (or maybe Shanghainese, I forget).

More in Shanghainese than Mandarin, a lot of my French friends were teased by their Shanghainese partners because of that.

This is really an example of a university administration that rejects culture and critical thinking in favor of quick snap judgement and celebrating ignorance. I'd expect better of universities, they should be a bastion of culture and critical thinking standing against idiocy. And instead of punishing that teacher, they should explain and make sure students understand that there are other cultures and that context matters.

The entire lead up to the professor saying it is the professor also explaining how certain cultures like in Chinese have pause words. There is absolutely all the correct context. The entire suspension is absurd.

Chinese sometimes joke that "bonjour" sounds like 胖猪 (pangzhu, which means 'fat pig').

Anyone who is taught to look for racism everywhere - no matter how minor - will find it everywhere. The false-positive rate must be astronomical.

Yes! I am a female in the tech industry, and we are inundated with warnings about going into a male dominated field. I’ve noticed it gets to a point where some women can’t even receive criticism because they think “he wouldn’t talk to another man like that,” even if the criticism is valid. I can see why it happens though. We hear over and over about being harassed and put down that we almost subconsciously get a chip on our shoulder about it.

I’m not saying that racism or sexism doesn’t happen. But I am saying I see how a person can also take something as racist or sexist just because it’s something you’re told to expect.

O guess these things also depend on country, in Eastern Europe where I'm from many high position successful women leaders have stated that gender quotas are actually offensive and they wouldn't want to be so called diversity hire. I think about it often how Americans who get into somewhere because of their knowledge and skill but are part of some minority think affirmative action (discrimination for us), it would be obvious for people to suspect then they are only there because of lowered exceptions.

That sounds like the robustness principle, featured in RFC 1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) among others: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" or "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive."

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

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855

Yes, of course if you look for something you will find more of it. But many Black people are in fact not looking for it at all. And yet, it still finds them and it can hurt them because even if the intention is pure, the action can still hurt.

Perhaps you've had someone innocently comment about how nice it is to see a woman in engineering since there are so few? Maybe that doesn't bother you at all. But what if you get that comment constantly, several times a week for you entire career? I suspect it would start to weigh on you and you would become quite exhausted by it. You might even start feeling that you don't belong. Or maybe wonder if your gender is the only thing people notice about you.

Then also imagine that we all wore name tags that identified your career. And now you can't even escape it when you are not at work, you get it at the checkout line too. And from your waiter, etc, etc.

Ironically, the whole over-reaction can be seen as a form of culture imperialism. Punishing people for using other language is itself racism, in this case, to the Chinese minorities. Last time I check, there is no official language in US.

Two possible futures for ill-informed over-political correctness:

1. It continues to be pushed by those at the tops of organizations, which leads to a new pseudo-language of baby-talk that is constructed to be as inoffensive as possible. Simultaneously a ‘black market’ counter-culture emerges of those who don’t comply.

2. The entire enterprise collapses under its own weight and exhaustion. People get tired of being offended and move on.

It's pushed by the top because it's virtue signaling. To stay silent is to be complicit. Yet at the same time it's a lot cheaper than actual change. And bored administrators can spend money on PR campaigns and harass lecturers and researchers, and go home to their comfy house and continue to vote to support their own lifestyle.

> The entire enterprise collapses under its own weight and exhaustion. People get tired of being offended and move on.

You'd hope so. But that complaint in the article might have happened regardless: it only takes a few indefatigable die-hards to keep that machine going.

No, it takes the majority to constantly validate these intentional or maybe ignorant dickheads.

A few complaints should not be able to make a university give in/up. They do so because there is a big group amplifying the outrage.

> People get tired of being offended and move on.

Won't happen, until it brings them benefits.

The craziest thing about this is that it wasn't - as I initially assumed - a misunderstanding. The Dean's email says the professor used 'a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English'.. 'Chinese'.. 'similar'... ok, yes, and?

Edit: No - wait, it gets weirder - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/zoom_0.mp4?_=1 - he even introduces it! He doesn't just use it himself, he's actually talking about it!

> in China the common word [for pauses in speech] is 'that', so you might say 'that-that-that': 'nage-nage-nage'

It sounds like he can sue for lost and potential lost salary for sure. This is not a legitimate reason to fire him if he was doing it innocently. Students could have said something and he could have avoided it I suppose. However whenever I hear the term "microaggressions" I know I'm talking with an idiot who values being emotional over being logical and just stop the conversation.

It's apparently a common word, a demonstrative pronoun, similar to "that". Pretty hard to avoid without language acrobatics.

Did you watch the video of him using it? While it’s a very common phrase while speaking Mandarin, and while I do not think this is a fireable offense, the professor could have chosen one of dozens of other examples in his lecture very easily.

I really don't think that Chester Pierce was an idiot who valued being emotional over being logical.

While there is disagreement over how prevalent they are or what if anything should be done about them, micro-aggressions obviously exist. I find this sort of hostility to the very concept perplexing.

This was not a micro-aggression. And to discount the existence of real micro-agressions is rather lacking in critical thinking skills.

The comment at the end is spot on:

  Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country."

My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipped away at by people who get "triggered" so easily.

It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any forbidden words, replacing them with, for now, non-triggering words. Not one person, to my knowledge has even politely questioned publicly whether this was a good use of company funds. If I was a shareholder I'd be outraged.

A small, core group of people loudly make this a huge issue of great importance, while the rest of us just want to get our work done and stay silent so we don't get fired by the woke patrol.

Honestly I can't wait until retirement when I don't have to constantly be walking on eggshells at work. It's sad--I used to love working in tech but it's insufferable now.

That's honestly just poor leadership from scared management. Management should be clearly articulating the mission, goals, and "culture" (for lack of a better word) of the company. This gives management and other employees grounds to challenge well meaning but unnecessary social action by forcing proponents to explain how those social actions would align with / further the goals, mission, and culture of the org. Usually proponents of these woke policies are not capable of doing this.

I don't know if there is a word for it, but I see it as a type of social bikeshedding.

In regular bikeshedding we spend a lot of time arguing over minor factors because everyone feels like they can have meaningful input and contribute. Then we gloss over the complicated stuff because it's too hard to get into.

In this case, people feel like they can push hard on relatively minor issues like uses of words and phrases because they can make a noticeable impact. Precisely because they feel powerless to effect actual systemic change. Widespread protest doesn't seem to change much, but targeted complaints can sometimes get someone fired.

There may be an argument that it could work as a ground-up approach similar to NYC's broken window policing, but I personally doubt that. I think the backlash will be a net negative.

Can you kindly provide an example of the type of behavior you might engage in at work in absence of the 'woke patrol' (as you described it)?

But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?

Deans, just like CEOs, are at the top of the leadership chain to protect the interests of the institution, and especially to maintain a long-term vision against short-term gains and speculation.

Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook.

In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now.

I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay:

>> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. <<

>> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left <<

http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html

I would say that's the most likely explanation. Plus, we see very similar things happen in primary education, where the loudest craziest parents cause the biggest potential PR/legal kerfuffles, so the schools often bend to them instead of standing on educational principles.

This essay provides a highly thought-provoking answer:

https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/

The argument is sophisticated and hard to summarise, but essentially, the author argues that "enlightenment liberalism" (i.e. the sort of philosophy that dominates universities) has a flaw at its centre that both creates Marxists and causes "enlightenment liberals" to constantly give in to the demands of those Marxists. The cycle goes like this:

1. Liberals assert that henceforth all with be free and equal, and that these things are self-evidently desirable (i.e. using reason alone).

2. Some liberals observe that life is full of inequalities and lack of freedoms. Because everyone is supposed to have equal opportunities, and because liberalism is generally uninterested in historical or traditional justifications for things, unequal outcomes demand an explanation which they find in the assumption of oppressive hierarchies. These liberals become Marxists.

3. They demand affirmative actions be taken in order to rectify these supposed oppressions. Embarrassed by the existence of inequality and lack of freedoms after declaring that their society is meant to have neither, liberals agree to these demands.

4. Realising they got what they wanted with little resistance, and that inequalities and lack of freedoms still exist, Marxists return to step 1.

In this framework the cause is nothing as simple or skin-deep as bad PR or lawsuits. Perhaps fear of those does play a role, but the author argues that the core reason is that the university is staffed by people who are genuinely embarrassed and upset by Marxist critique. Lacking intellectual ammo or a coherent philosophy of inequality, they invariably cave in when faced with outspoken demands that appear to align with their own agenda of equality.

I have said this before and will continue to say this: to put an end to this, liberals in the United States need to openly repudiate identity politics progressivism and cancel culture. Former-President Obama has ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca... ); we should too.

Please speak up and, more importantly, please vote for old-school liberals instead of progressives.

Politics isn't going to solve this. You could elect an anti-PC theorist like Donald Trump, or an old school liberal like Nancy Pelosi, and this sort of thing would keep happening.

The real solution is just awareness. As people see more examples of this sort of thing going wrong they will be more careful about it.

I'm okay with Obama rejecting identity politics if that's what he's doing, but it seems to me more like he's been spending his time post-presidency advocating for a certain style of incremental reform: just make small fixes right now to make things a little bit better, and as he likes to say: "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice".

The problem I have with that, is that for some problems you can't just fix it with incremental reform, you have to rip the bandaid off, and if you reject any reforms that aren't small incremental fixes to what we have, you end up fixing the small problems and leaving the big structural problems. Opinions will reasonably differ on how to deal with the problems facing society, but Obama's approach seems to me to be a little bit like vacuuming your living room while the house is on fire.

On the other hand, you have someone like Bernie Sanders, who isn't at all shy about advocating for significant structural reforms (similar in scope to the New Deal) and is about as progressive as anyone can be in American politics, yet at the same time he doesn't put any stock in identity politics either. I haven't listened to as much from AOC, but I get the impression she's the same way. In fact, I don't know of any major political leader who fits the mold of the "social justice warrior" or "political-correctness police" stereotype. I haven't run into very many of those people in my day-to-day life either, but my impression is that they're largely people without any great deal of power except maybe on University campuses.

Tl;dr: don't be afraid to vote for progressives in general with the aim of thwarting identity politics. A lot of prominent progressives aren't really fans of it either.

The irony of the new anti free speech movement is that much of it sprung up on Berkeley’s campus (and nearby SF), which is also host to the famous Free Speech Cafe.

That's a vast overstatement. To the point of being ridiculous. This kind of thing happens more than it used to but is still extremely rare. And in this case represents a misunderstanding. McCarthyism was also a government initiative. Private universities can do whatever they want. Someplace like Liberty University actively censors and punishes liberal views, but people are less likely to get upset because it's expected.

At the end of the day, students vote with their wallet.

The decision of the dean chooses to protect an environment of low-risk social-compliant low-EQ classroom, which will act as a deterrent on the university's prestige moving forward (e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard).

At the end of the day the dean might get fired for his actions. To use an analogy, "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, but if for years you're left beyond Amazon"... one might need to eventually take a hard look at the university leadership and make the needed changes.

Incredibly tonedeaf on part of the University - they claim to fight for those that are marginalized, but how will the Chinese international students on campus feel, now that a precedent has been set that they'll have to think twice before speaking in their native tongue?

Watching the video, I cannot fathom how anyone can interpret this as being a racial slur?

This is a common idiom in Chinese, people say it all the time.

This is baffling and truly terrifying. Are we really there? This sort of overreaching witch hunting is belittling the fight against racism.

Am I missing something?

I cannot fathom how anyone can interpret this as being a racial slur?

Nobody believed it was. This was a a demonstration of power by the extreme "progressives", reminding the faculty that they will do exactly as told or be smeared as bigots.

> Last Thursday in your GSBA-542 classes, Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better.

This was apparently written by a university dean, in a Western country, in 2020. Not during the Dark Ages or the Inquisition, in 2020.

Assuming it's true, if that does not make people pause and doubt human progress, I don't know what will.

"I am deeply saddened by this disturbing episode that has caused such anguish and trauma."

We should be considering the implications of this claim, if it were true. There's a generation of young adults in this country that have been brought up so emotionally weak that they can be traumatized by a white person uttering sounds that resemble the n-word.

In other words, we have given white people unimaginable powers over the psyche of young minority Americans, because of an upbringing that shielded them from racially insensitive content.

In this case, perhaps the best remedy would be exposure therapy with Russell Peters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsWp07BwVk

And suddenly the president's call to defund universities for "radical left indoctrination" sounds a tiny bit less crazy.

It was never crazy, just a wildly disproportionate knee-jerk reaction that ignores the real underlying issues, cultural and legal.

Apart from the impact to the professor and his students who have been denied a learning opportunity, this is the larger cultural problem - validating the simplistic "other side". Both teams are rallying around straw men for each other to attack, driving polarization over essentially nonsense. Meanwhile anyone arguing for sanity gets labeled as an other for not toting the unreasonable party line. Despite claiming to be opposed to one another, Cancellers and Trumpists are just two faces of the same destructive force.

Students of Swedish or Danish at this university will (presumably) be ignorant of the word "slut" (end, finished), and maybe the number six ("sex" / "seks") too.

"We will start the Danish course with the numbers. En, to, tre, fire, fem, fem plus en, syv, otte, ni, ti."

I'm currently studying Danish and can't help but be amused when every 'lyt og gentag' exercise ends with 'slut'. But just as in the OP, it's not even the same vowel as the English word, so the resemblance is only passing. How absurd that careers may be ruined by using the wrong two consonants next to each other. How absurd that we call it progress.

What I wonder about, and this has been in the news briefly, is the transformation of mening of the Danish word "neger". Somehow people are starting to think it has the same sting as term referred to in the article does in the US, when actually it's purely an archaic term for someone of African origin. People are getting upset about it and giving it a meaning from another context.

I too am just embarrassed for everyone when I read these apologies, somebody go talk to the accreditation boards for that university and get it re-evaluated.

And at no point before it got this far did anyone ask ‘perhaps, part of the knowledge we’re buying for $120,000 and part of the value our future employers will impute into that degree is the cultural literacy and emotional competence to discern when a Chinese colleague is saying “ummmmm” and when they’re casually tossing out racial epitaphs midsentence?’

I think it's important to note that nowhere in the article (nor anywhere else I can find) does it state that the professor was "suspended". Rather, it only says that the professor will "no longer be teaching this class for the remainder of the semester".

I think this is an important distinction because it leaves the door open to the possibility that: 1) the professor voluntarily stepped down 2) the professor will return after the semester is over 3) the professor is being paid during this leave and will suffer no real professional consequences.

In other words, there's a real possibility that the Dean had the following conversation with the professor: "Hey, I know this wasn't intentional on your part, but this is quickly becoming a PR nightmare and I'd like to nip it in the bud. Would you mind stepping down from your post for just this semester until this dies down and I can get a handle on it? This will make everyone's life easier & you'll still get paid anyways."

In this light, there's less reason to be outraged at the Dean.

I think it's important to note that nowhere in the article (nor anywhere else I can find) does it state that the professor was "suspended".

The action was asymptotically close to a suspension (so in attempting to draw a distinction, you're basically splitting hairs).

In other words, there's a real possibility that the Dean had the following conversation with the professor:

More likely that conversation went like this:

"Hey, I know this wasn't intentional on your part, but this is quickly becoming a PR nightmare and I'd like to nip it in the bud. If we were to go by common sense and the basic ethical and intellectual principles this institution claims to uphold, we'd simply explain to the student that (being young and naive as they are) they're clearly jumping the gun and not seeing the forest for the trees -- and are doing themselves way, way, way more harm in delusionally believing themselves to have been 'microaggressed' by what happened, than by even the worst case version of what they fantasize as having happened. But that would require a modicum of ethical integrity and backbone on my own part, which, being the stuffed shirt that I am, you know I don't come even close to possessing. So to make my life simpler, would you mind taking the hit, stepping down from your post and basically allowing everyone to believe you were an insensitive ass (if not in fact an outright racist) for a while? BTW you'll still get paid - and this being USC, that's all anyone really expects you to care about anyways."

Even if that was the case, have you actually read the letter? It alone is so ridiculous that it's worth condemning.

Hell, I think this bit does it alone:

"It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students"

Like, what? Are they going to outright ban all foreign words that could potentially be misunderstood as offensive? Will Kant need a rebranding to be allowed in class again?

It's unbelievable ethnocentrism and the fact that they actually have the gall to claim that they're doing it as a part of addressing systemic racism has to be the cherry on top. This is literally the same line of thought that leads to asking others to anglicize their name because it is offensive.

I agree with you. My claim is that there's "less reason to be outraged at the Dean".

If the professor was executed for this, for most people, there's reason to go to war.

If the professor was fired, for most people, there's reason to be outraged.

If the professor was voluntarily placed on leave with pay, well, maybe you still find reason to be outraged, but less so than the aforementioned scenarios.

In any case, most people in this thread are assuming the professor was fired, and that's incorrect.

PR nightmare is a bit extreme. A few students emailed the dean is all. I feel as though in these situations, you have a moral obligation not to back down if you did nothing wrong. Otherwise the bounds of what one is allowed to say gradually erodes away. Sort of like the “first they came for...” poem

Completely disagree. The professor did nothing wrong and shouldn't have to take the fall for anyone.

It's ultimately a question of ethics if the scenario is as you play it out. Is it ethical to effectively declare your guilt when you are innocent.

We don't disagree on your point. I'm just pointing out that the degree of punishment enacted on the professor could be much less severe than most people are imagining.

I disagree with the assertion, prior to your edit, that the complaint was necessarily unwarranted.

But regardless, the reactions in the comments here are verging on hysterical - references to McCarthy, and even Stalin and Mao.

I've always found the US obsession with taboo words quite baffling. I used to tease Americans of my acquaintance by pretending to be offended when they said "oh my god" (dildo in French) or nick (fuck.)

Context matters a lot in linguistic, and the Sapir-Worff hypothesis is not just unproven, it's almost certainly completely wrong.

Also with sexuality. My worry is that with the American cultural imperialism through Hollywood our European liberal approach to sexuality will become more puritanical. E.g. sex only after 18, teenage sex is more or less illegal (19y/o with a 17y/o).

Friends of mine already think that American laws around sexuality are valid worldwide and sex with an under-18 is forbidden. Which is absolutely false in the case of Germany.

Without trying to be alarmist, I have a feeling that's slowly spreading to Europe too, at least France and Germany.

I also found it very baffling from a French standpoint. Obviously, spouting out des "gros mots" in polite society is frowned upon but the the magical thinking around 4 letter words in the US is on a whole other level.

The country was founded by puritans and it still shows in many ways.

What is more baffling is that this attitude is exported internationally.

When I was a kid, it would never occur to me that the Russian word негр has negative connotations.

Now, the word негр disappeared from public use.

Yes it's a joke, show an exploding head in the Cinema...no problem. A naked breast...big NONO.

>I've always found the US obsession with taboo words quite baffling

Once a puritan, always a puritan. Religion inspired worldviews get dilluted into the general culture and inspire even those that don't believe (and in the US, where assimilation is everything, even those that come from other cultures).

I heard one cannot say "disabled", "hearing-impaired", "wheelchair-bound" as those are offensive terms.

when they said "oh my god" (dildo in French)

They were probably confused because you were mixing English 'oh my' with the well known Québecois word for a small penguin (un gode).

There aren't that many taboo words in America. You can validate that by watching a few episodes of most any Netflix or cable tv drama. Europe, however, actually has illegal words. It is illegal to say heil hitler in germany or display nazi symbols. And I believe france has certain english words banned from official use.

"nique" or "niquer" in French is pretty interesting... It's actually an Arabic swear word meaning the same thing.

那个 is the chinese equivalent to "uh/um". Just imagine how many times a probably nervous professor would say "uh/um" during a lecture. The professor also is likely not great at english or has a strong accent.

Not sure how anyone could mistake this for a racial slur with hateful intent.

The professor isn’t nervous or Chinese - he’s explaining the same thing that you explain

Geoff Garrett would have done well in East Germany. The unproductive nomenklatura is oppressing the productive part of the population.

Why do humans always allow this to happen? The easiest way to shut down those bureaucrats is to ask publicly what their actual intellectual output is.

They often tend to get very silent. Also works for whip crackers in the software industry.

Funny enough, "nomenclatura" in Spanish means the act/state/art of naming things. Such as Biology on new species. or Chemistry rules on new compounds.

Just wait until they figure out what the word for the color "black" is in Spanish...

For laughs, there is a hundred year old Hungarian/Serbian hard candy called Negro. The author's name was Pietro Negro, and the candy is charcoal black because of liquorice and doped with menthol, which gives it a distinctive medicine taste. People love it or hate it, I love it personally. In the meantime, more flavours are developed in Serbia, with eucalyptus, peppermint, lime, caramel... And all of them called Negro because it's just a strong brand name.

Nevertheless, every once in a while there is some wiseguy trying to make a story out of it, just ruining the fun. If we really want to take that discussion, I would argue that it's actually an homage to people of color, being so popular yet unrelated to colonialism or slavery and treated like a folk remedy for a sore throat.

I (don't) look forward to the future where the translation for "I have a black car" in Spanish would be "tengo un auto n-asterisco-asterisco-asterisco-asterisco"...

Guess what the N word comes from...

I think all of the comments here that say "McCarthyism and cancel culture have taken over our universities!" miss the point.

The real story is that in the US, we are politically polarized enough to buy into the dean's story that this is the only reason for the suspension.

Universities are run as businesses nowadays and I can assure you that they don't care about angry students unless there is money or prestige to be made in appeasing them. At a past university I attended, class enrollment was horribly broken causing people to miss out on courses they needed to graduate. Basically the whole student body was mad and made it known and sent around petitions, but nothing changed. The fix being pushed by students would literally just require changing a config file somewhere and sending some emails, but nobody cared.

If universities won't lift a finger for issues that cause campus wide outrage, why would I believe that they'd suspend someone after a twitter minority gets unreasonably angry about something like this. I'm at one of the super liberal universities in the US and I can promise you that it really is a minority. Even in the liberal arts classes I've attended, everyone I've met would be like "yeah, that's an unfortunate mistake and at most you should probably just inform him that the word sounds like a slur". I have literally never met someone that would call for a firing except for on twitter. I've also taught classes here and never met one, so I know it isn't a selection effect where I'm in a bubble. I don't get to choose the students I teach.

There is 100% more going on than what the dean is claiming. Maybe it's administrative drama. Maybe the professor wasn't pulling in enough grant money. Maybe the university was eyeing his salary and knew about an adjunct that will do it cheaper and thought that this would be a nice excuse to make a change. From everything I know about universities and from currently working at one, the guy didn't get fired for something as outlandish as saying a word that sounded like something else. It just doesn't make sense.

I once said in a senior staff meeting that we shouldn’t be niggardly with employee benefits. A disturbing quiet dropped over the room and I realized a half dozen white men and women were staring at me, while uncomfortably not making eye contact with our African American Business Development director.

The CEO rebuked me saying that was not the type of language I should be using. The Director of Business Development then spoke, he was a Stanford graduate who was always the nicest smartest guy in the room. He gently corrected the CEO, saying exactly what I understood, it was an Old English term meaning cheapness that had no connection (other than its sound) to the racial insult and he wasn’t offended at all.

Thank god for Johns erudite knowledge of historic English words and his omnipresent empathy but think it illustrates an important point. Intent should matter. Even if the word I used had a connection to a racial slur, I would have been unaware and in no way would intentionally use such a slur, not alone in a group of white men let alone in front of a valued colleague.

That word can never leave my mental database of descriptive terms and phrases, but I fight against its use even more so today, afraid it might unconsciously slip out.

To be honest, when I hear someone use that word, I do assume it's primarily in service of saying something that sounds like the n-word with plausible deniability. It'd be something else if it was a commonly used word

There have been tons of memes about this exact misunderstanding in SAT for a while...

The first few times I heard it (as a native English speaker) it made my head turn but it's such a commonly used part of Chinese that after hearing it for the thousandth time you stop hearing it as English.

EDIT: After watching the video I have to say that the combination of pronouncing it a bit off and surrounding it with English made it sound pretty bad on the surface, but it definitely didn't sound intentional.

It's not like he just threw it into an English sentence the way we often do with French (when it seems the mot juste) though - he was actually talking about the word and its usage!

Not sure if this link will always work but here is the instance being referred to: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/zoom_0.mp4?_=1

If he was suspended for that, it is truly a sad day for USC. There seems to be 0 malicious intent; he's explicitly referring to "that that that" before saying it in Chinese. This is a common way of saying "um..." in fast speech. He also seems like a good professor. It's too bad some student found the need to complain when it is obvious there is no bad intent meant.

He was suspended for that??? Ridiculous. Seriously, the far left has ruined educational institutions. They are so obsessed with attacking "racism" or "hate" even when neither are involved. They don't care about context, they don't care about intent, they don't care about ANYTHING. This seriously needs to stop

From a movie I watched about 50 times as a youngster: [0] I wonder if such humor will ever be made again.

(fyi, me and my friends were all white but big fans of Tupac and Snoop and followed the whole Deathrow related dramas closely! Tupac is an absolute legend to me still, what an artist, pure poetry, It's very nice to listen to his music and get an idea about his life.)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk0abbYgXQ

"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label." -- From Dawn to Decadence (2000), Jacques Barzun.

Clarification: here the slur is "decadent", not the one mentioned in the article.

Yeah USC never belonged in the top 25 US Colleges, but their current leadership seems hell-bent on correcting any misconceptions.

That's ridiculous.

If anyone here vicariously forms opinions from black people telling you what to believe, you now have my opinion.

Everyone knows you cant say shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, and 那个.

Warning: I'm not sure how to formulate that properly, I hope no-one gets offended to much.

I think one of the worst thinks you can do is to be afraid of a word itself. But that's exactly where it has come to. It often seems that just pronouncing the n* word or spelling it out is highly offensive.

But IMHO this is super bad for the people who are offended.

If there is a problem you should speak about it and this include pronouncing and spelling the offensive word.

If you don't you are only helping the people which use that word as a insult and a denouncement. You are now at risk of feeling offended or even threatend from just hearing the word even if it's not directed at you , not used as the insult and maybe you misheard (like above).

Demonizing a word when it's the contextual usage of the word which is the problem isn't really helping anyone I believe.

Don't get me wrong using the word to insult, denounce or describe an person is an absolute no-go and as far as I can tell should stay that way.

But when you speak about e.g. how someone breached that no-go and how that is not ok you shouldn't be afraid to use that word instead.

And yes I'm not using the word here because I know how people can be offended by it.

Still fear the abuse of words but don't fear words itself or the fear might just eat you up.

(Abuse as n* originally only described someone from Nigeria, like Berlin => BerlinER with some shortening. But yes this doesn't matter anymore at all and might sometimes even be used to downplay the insult which is not ok.)

FYI, your etymology is wrong. The n word derives from spanish and latin for black (this itself possibly derived from the proto-indo-european for "night"). While Nigeria and the Niger river come from local African languages for "river", although that pronunciation itself is probably influenced by the same latin-for-black. What eventually became Nigeria was a British company founded in 1886, well after the n-word was in common use for anyone of dark skin.

I heard my niece recite a poem in Spanish about a penguin - it's white in the front, black in the back.

I wonder how long before the woke kids decide to ban Spanish or demand a change in the word for "black".

The usage notes on this site for with the transcript of what the professor said: its a filler word, sometimes repeated like English "um, um".

https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/The_fil...

Lmao. I go to school with a lot of mandarin speakers (CU) and it’s fun to see non-Chinese-speaker’s ears perk up when they hear something so close to a racial slur.

I made a joke about this exact scenario years ago.

> Lmao. I go to school with a lot of mandarin speakers (CU) and it’s fun to see non-Chinese-speaker’s ears perk up when they hear something so close to a racial slur.

Don't tar all non-Chinese speakers with the same brush. As far as I can tell, this is a purely American phenomenon. No other country is so addicted to taking offense that foreign languages are now danger zones.

There is a old joke that Americans are probably better off not knowing how a Russian word for "a book" is pronounced.

Okay this makes sense, everyone should know by now that being white and saying the N-word in ANY context is a third-rail. USC likely doesn't want professors who can't figure that out, what else will they screw up?

So much problems to solve and they choose this one?

Is it bizarre this is an MBA class?

What's going to happen when these aspiring business people visit other countries?

Shocking response from the management. I thought people in universities are supposed to be educated.

It's the first word you hear repeated in China, like kurwa (that one is vulgar) in Polish.

Incidentally in Portuguese “curva”, pronounced exactly the same, means curve.

Putting this here because it quotes the statement of complaint for context, which has got a bit buried - and it may address some of the more superficial commentary:

http://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2020/09/04/usc-marshall-pro...

When I was a child, I was in the supermarket with my mother and apparently I was repeating some Polish phrase containing the infinitive “to be”. The Polish equivalent is “być” which sounds like “bitch”. From what I’ve been told, it drew some attention, but the impression I’m left with is that eavesdroppers were more amused than offended. Similarly, my Spanish-speaking classmates in school found it amusing that a common way to refer to one’s aunt is “ciocia” which is pronounced like the Spanish word “chocha”. The same holds for English words like “duper” as in “super duper” which sounds almost like the Polish “dupa” (especially when spoken in non-rhotic English). This extends to brand names (the name of the German lighting manufacturer Osram is a good example: it is the simple future first conjugation of the Polish transitive verb “to shit all over“).

Given how ubiquitous this phenomenon is, and how international UPenn is, I am having trouble comprehending how a professor could be fired for a perfectly banal Chinese expression which many of us have heard many times in American cities with significant Chinese populations.

I just watched the video and in context, suspending this guy does a disservice to: the student, who must learn to listen and process in context; the educator, who must teach without fear; and the school, that loses revenue because it becomes both feared and a laughing stock. If I've somehow been misled, I don't mean to offend, but seriously, this does not bode well for anyone in higher education.

When I read stories like this I can't help but think of Newspeak[0] from 1984. From afar (not a native English speaker nor a US resident here) it feels like a form of control over people through control of their language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

As a native English speaker and US citizen / resident I think you are 100% correct in your observation.

I wonder whether this would've had the same effect if he had said it in a classroom instead of an online video lecture.

This rush to punish scholars for "incorrect" expression is reminesicent of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

I guess the ship has sailed on academia resisting this nonsense

It’s time for academics to fight for the right of « scholastic sanctuary » as featured in His Dark Materials.

For people who are confused, here's an informative video on the phrase and misconceptions: https://youtu.be/bqmO4yvoXwQ?t=46. He does a great job with the correct pronunciation too.

The funny thing here is that the professor is speaking English throughout, so when he says 那个, 那个, 那个 … (as the translation for "that, that, that …") it really sounds like the English derogatory word. That explains a lot of the reaction, I think.

context is being purposefully ignored here though.

Intent matters, and we shouldn't be allowed to be lazy and assume others' intent and then get angry at them because of our own assumptions. I don't see how banning this guy for speaking his language isn't just the most blatant normalized racism. This incentivizes people to remain ignorant and not learn about others' cultures. This is an embarrassing direction for a University to go in.

In general I think this micro-aggression/Karen-culture is an awful direction we are going in. At some point, being offended at everything is itself offensive. It is offensive to me that you choose not to understand me, and instead get mad about some fictitious damages.

The pronunciation is very common in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean. If the offended person ever visits Asia, he'd find himself punching literally every person. This is extremely arrogant and disrespectful of other cultures. It's even more bizarre that the college takes the report seriously.

For instance, listen to this (once extremely popular) song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6QA3m58DQw

No reasonable person would, or should be offended. I hope that person never leaves his/her English speaking community.

> It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students.

Psychological safety? What does that mean?

I hate these vague, marketing-like terms. Just say what you mean: you find it unacceptable to say something that causes a negative emotion. The problem is that saying it like this makes it sound less problematic — because it is. Whereas using the word “safety” implies a physical danger as opposed to just negative emotion.

Are any unrelated observers trying to defend this suspension? How would one even begin to go about doing that?

This seems like a topic where everybody can and does agree that the reaction is wrong.

那個 is a verbal filler [1] as common and as harmless as um, like, you know…

I remember hearing it as the punchline of a joke highlighting a linguistic and cultural mixup. Never imagined the mixup would be taken as a serious offense.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)

This is so amazingly stupid it blows my mind. I've always thought the right wing hand wringing over "cancel culture" was over blown, however this is such a stupid case of over reaction that its making me re-evaluate my stance.

See the history of this B-school dean. He was the dean of Wharton b-school before. Prior to that, he was a professor at Stanford.

B-school deans reflect the corporate America: virtue signaling. I think, USC must be paying Dean Garrett at least a million dollar per annum or even more. This is the expected behavior from people like him.

We live in clown world.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200907082111/https://languagel...

This is obviously a prank/joke trying to fool you.... right? ... i mean right?... it has to... omg ..

On a more cynical note, i am surprised they sacked him on a misunderstanding and not on cultural appropiation charges for using a foreign language.

It says it means "That one" in Google translate? What's up with this?

I remember noticing in China that it seemed very common in Chinese casual chitchat, but to Western ears it sounded inappropriate. In the context of a lecture, I imagine it would come down to whether the delivery seemed genuinely part of the point or an excuse to push boundaries. Hard to gauge without audio/tone.

I can’t think of why you’d report this unless you had a serious issue with the lecturer or they were being purposefully inappropriate.

那（nà,that）个（gè,one）。 Also 'umm, uh, like, so'. English has the same thing, for example when you can't think of a word and just start with 'that, those'.

'Eh, what's that.. that, uh, the name of that function?'

It's pretty easy to mishear it, but 99% of the time you can see from the context that they're not just wildly dropping n-bombs..

It basically sounds like "n*gga" when said fast.

The ponounciation of "那个" in Chinese is similar to "nigger", which makes some students unhappy.

It's just a filler word even though it can be literally translated as "that one", as you said.

A while a go there was meme on reddit called "nae nae", a Chinese song repeatedly singing "that one that one" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTkNFnDcPLA

I assume it's because the pronunciation sounds a bit like "nigga", though not really.

Yes. The lecture was on filler words, if I understand correctly, and Chinese use this word as "uhm" in English.

There is of course no issue at all.

If Ne-ga is followed by other nouns, it becomes more like "that.....that...tha..." or "the...the...the"

Romanised it’s “nà ge“. According to the linked article it was deemed too similar to a racial slur.

It's pronounced "nega"

There you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j556MWGVVqI

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Talks to [Students from a PC University Club]

Here's what Russel Peters has to say about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvnx1wcrbcg

The first time I knew the two words (那个 and n*gger) was from a report about Yao Ming who was a basketball play in NBA. I just thought it'e more like a joke...but, it become real and unreal today

Suspended by someone who has never heard a Chinese person talk to another Chinese person in Chinese. There's at least 1 "n-word" per minute there. Professor should sue their ass.

Good summary : “Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsWp07BwVk

Life imitates art in a bad way at times.

Ah yes, when I was in China I constantly heard people say it...

niggeh... nigge... nig uh.. depends a bit on where and who in China but it sounds eerily similar to the untrained ear.

那个can be pronounced either (nà ge) or (nèi ge). When it's used in a pause, it's most typically (nèi ge) not (nà ge), the title should be updated.

depends on the locale, in my area almost no one says nei ge.

>psychological safety of our students

Are those student's even allowed to watch the news or is "Detective Barbie" the only watchable thing?

Detective Barbie is very problematic due to extensive transphobic and gender-normative storytelling. Here at the UCC (University of Corrected Culture), we only allow our students to watch videos of kittens.

I've gotten heat for saying this in the past, but the "student" community of certain academic departments are almost looking to be offended at anything these days.

The perils of social media and cancel culture...

This seems a rather nonacademic response.

If it was a German professor talking about buttermilk do you think he would given a build up?

Am I the only one who finds it very ironic that you can't use the "n-word" because it offends the African American community. Yet when you listen to rap music, it's all nigga this and nigga that.

Makes me wonder if these offended students first complain, and then drive home singing along with Snoop Dogg.

> Am I the only one who finds it very ironic that you can't use the "n-word" because it offends the African American community. Yet when you listen to rap music, it's all nigga this and nigga that.

No, racists that are upset that it's not socially acceptable to demonstrate their racism this way conplain about this a lot, you aren't the only one.

Also, within the African American community there has very long been a very large group that has attacked this trend in that particular form of popular entertainment.

And, finally, beyond that, context matters.

I agree, as a non-American this thing is really weird, what's even weirder is that people can't even say the word. It reminds me of Harry Potter and how they call Voldermort as "the one who cannot be named" or something similar. This is really interesting as I don't think I've heard of another culture where some words are avoided in this way, by literally beeping the word in real life. I guess beeping is a big thing in the US after all.

So is it okay to sing along to Snoop Dogg and say the n-word, or no? I'm actually unsure, since my close friends wouldn't care.

I heard nega (as in negative), not niga (as in shenanigan), are my ears off?

If you grew up speaking mandarin, you would likely hear it yet a different way.

lol remember 100 years ago when whistles got blown and men this age went over the trenches to face their certain death so we'd have the freedom to cry over being offended literally by sound waves

To echo one of responses to the blog post: What a niggardly (and just plain ludicrous) response to what could only have been an entirely innocuous coincidence.

Not too long from now, USC will look back on this episode with a profound sense of regret and embarassment.

People like to blame progressive ideology for these sort of crazy stuff. But actually, the real culprit is consumerism and customer mentality of students. The professor was suspended because the faculty is terrified from upset customers. Same goes for all cancel culture incidents.

The hyper producticised media , is using the upset sentiment to get attention (racial clickbait triggers) But it's riding the tiger, so it needs to keep pace with its own click bait to not get the customers to hate them and boycott them.

This dynamics spills onto the academic realm. Students at US colleges consider themselves customers. So they must never be made upset. They have silly optic based notions of justice. And the faculty have to comply.

This is what contemporary information capitalism does. Consumes and kill off any sort of idea turning it to plastic product and optics.

Can't let post-modernism and critical race theory off the hook.

Objectively, the statement was not racist and it should not be offensive to anyone. However, objective thought is not in favor anymore as it is associated with whiteness. We must accept the subjective view of the victims as paramount.

This happens if people in power only speak a single language.

For a number of reasons, including this kind of political correct fascism, cost, irrelevant coursework in 95% of majors, ideological approach to knowledge, I think American Universities have jumped the shark.

Ahhah, all this silliness makes me want to use word "niggard" and "niggardly" where it's appropriate

This action is so obviously wrong I can't but wonder if its not some prank. It would be an ideal prank for the Chinese in particular, to audit the course (at first as an attempt to see how Chinese language and culture is taught here), and then stumble upon this coincidental pronunciation, in the context of a tinder-dry atmosphere of political correctness, and send in (multiple) complaints and watch America burn just a little bit more.

Truth is, if this was the case, then we deserved it. It seems sometimes like America has split into the two races in "The Dark Crystal", and we very badly need a reunification. We need the reason and open-mindedness of the left, and the practicality (and romanticism) of the right. We need to accept the truth that there are real differences between people (even groups of people) and celebrate those differences and not pretend they don't exist. We need to accept the truth that racial/ethnic/religious bigotry is essentially a human universal, which doesn't justify it but it also means you can't stop it with law or strongly worded emails to university authorities.

So yeah, if the CCP is behind this one, I say: thanks. Hope we can learn from it.

P.S. The culprit is the dean of the USC Marshall School of Business, Geoff Garrett, not UPenn. Also, according to the LA Times it was a group of black students, not the CCP. Feel free to call or write (213) 740-6422 ggarrett@marshall.usc.edu or tweet https://twitter.com/USCMarshall/ https://twitter.com/garrett_geoff

It would never be accidental. In China, English language students are taught to break that habit for fear of it being misinterpreted by a native English speaker.

It could be opportunistically malicious though, to feign outrage. That’s not beyond the realm of possibility at all.

Edit: people are asking how I ‘know’ this.

——

It is anecdotal, so I should have phrased it more carefully. When I was in mainland China about 15 years ago I talked to several people eager to practice their English, in various regions.

They were aware. One kid in particular I remember vividly having that conversation.

But this was a very small sample.

> We need to accept the truth that there are real differences between people (even groups of people) and celebrate those differences and not pretend they don't exist.

Is this a position that lots of people disagree with? You see the left talk a lot about the value of diversity, and you see the right talk a lot about differences between groups of people.

practicality isn't the word i would associate with the american right wing

> open-mindedness of the left

Did you even read the article? How is cancel culture "open-minded"? I'm legitimately confused and shook at how you could come to that conclusion... It would be really helpful if you could explain it.

那个请

(na-ge please)

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

I am really afraid this is another sign of the death throes of Liberal values and institutions.

They need to realise that pragmatism and nuance are acceptable and desirable attributes of a sustainable and long lasting civilisation.

why is this post not on front-page with 175 points in 1 hour whereas tons of post with barely any traction from 20 hours ago are still there?

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. See "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?"

In this case, users flagged it and it set off the flamewar detector.

It was. I think it got removed. Too inflamatory?

The video: https://twitter.com/cabot_phillips/status/130151642427657830...

Warning: strong opinions from all sides but very little of what is said in that thread makes sense!

it's also embedded in TFA

It's been obvious for a while that the US is primed for its own Cultural Revolution. It's why I ironically support the various West-Coast separatist movements, because the inevitable communist hell hole created would remind folks how bad life can be. Also ironically, Trump be the US' saving grace from all of this, at least for now.

Obviously, Chinese the language is racist. - An American, probably.

To play sort-of devil's advocate, while the concrete situation is completely over-the-top, it's easy to imagine that "nà ge" could become an actual racist dog whistle if widely enough known.

E.g., I personally believe there is ample room for criticism on the way the Israeli government treats Palestinians (to put it mildly). There are some attempts to define any and all criticism on the Israeli government by non-jews as anti-semitism, which frankly seems ridiculous to me.

Nevertheless, it's also true that "solidarity for Palestine" and "criticism on the Israeli government" are frequently used as covers and dog-whistles by actual antisemites. Marches in solidarity of Palestine can be easily be co-opted by Nazis if the organizers don't work too actively prevent it, even if the original intention was genuine.

In a similar way, white supremacists, racists, etc, might start to use "nà ge" as a substitute for the slur and attempt to back down with some bullshit excuse like "I was just speaking Chinese" when called out.

This is not advocating banning words preemptively because they could be used as slurs (nor banning pro-palestine demonstrations) but to stay vigilant. Context matters, but this goes both ways.

Since you are playing devil's advocate anyway, could you try to defend the concept of dog whistles? Recent events suggest that if someone wants to be racist they simply will, without any attempt to disguise it.

I also think it is too convenient to give one political movement the ability to say that their enemies are secretly racist (aka evil) even though everything they say is actually innocuous.

While the antisemitism example resonates somewhat, antisemitism withing the anti-Israel political movements is: A) not coded at all, and B) not a good reason to dismiss all anti-Israel arguments all of the time. Therefore, it is hard to see how the concept of dog-whistles is at all useful.

whats the point of that random devils advocate scenario when that isn't at all what happened and doesn't have any bearing on the current scenario

[flagged]

It existed before, but social media gave it the spark that set it all on fire.

Look up "Yuri Bezmenov", and be enlightened. His insight on subversion is eye opening. I'd link some stuff, but I'd probably be banned.

Students are "like that", because they feel powerless and complicit by slaving away in a virtually for-profit education system, that they see as part of the problem.

They understandably want change, progress, solidarity, etc. Basically think of this as the very very very watered down version of a student protest. After all young adults are the prime age cohort who are sensitive to social issues. This requires no organized subversion.

https://youtu.be/IQPsKvG6WMI

Marxist is WESTERN ideas and it came from Enlightenment.

Where do you think Marx was born?

> decades-long subversion campaigns

I get where you're coming from, but by phrasing it this way you draw up the image of a secret cabal of influential marxists waging a "campaign" via gullible students. That's not really doing the rest of your argument justice.

As always, the much more likely story is that these students are gullible and silly totally by their own means.

>But why are the students like that in the first place

Show their might over others probably.

Please leave Marx alone, he was the guy that spoke against the royalty and for a fair system. Lenin and Stalin of course is a complete different thing.

There's a bit of irony that, in response to a commoditization of education, your response is to blame "marxists." If anyone, blame marshall field because the customer definitely isn't always right.

> it could be the result of decades-long subversion campaigns that sought to supplant western/enlightenment ideals with authoritarian-marxist ideals which view speech as inherently dangerous

You must be joking. Please - tell me you are joking. It's hard to believe an educated adult could actually say what you are saying with a straight face.

EDIT: someone else here said it better: "The idea that Marxists are subverting Western society is a delusional theory pushed by far-right lunatics."

This is so far out there that there must be something else going on.

From his profile, the dean (Geoff Garrett) does not seem like someone who would be overly concerned with something like this.

Could it be a play for Trump? If not, is there something special with the power relationship between the MBA students and the University? Could it be a large company paying for their employees degrees threatening to withdraw?

I can’t believe the reactionary comments to this.

Of course, we have no idea of the context. But if it was anything like the linked video - and it could have been worse - it’s perfectly understandable why students would be surprised and perhaps upset.

If you disagree, its worth asking yourself, what reaction would you expect if you were a chinese professor enunciating the word “cunt” during a lecture, with no prior warning?

That video IS the context. It's Covid era - everything is streamed. We are all watching the same thing the students saw.

And if a Chinese professor prefaced the use of that word with an explanation about that word's usage in another language, I would find that a very memorable educational experience. That's it. I don't need to be warned about a sound because a similar sound with a different meaning is used in negative ways.

Do you get upset when you learn the word for "black" in spanish?

In combating against bigotry, it is important that we do not become bigots ourselves.

Regarding painful words, it is my position that policies against uttering them (for people without any intent to hurt) must essentially be no more a courtesy to those sensitized against them, because of words with multiple meanings and foreign languages with different meanings, and also because what is taboo on one society may not be taboo in another. Punishing the reasonably ignorant seems to be immoral to me.

Being sensitized to painful words spoken by people who don't mean them seems to me that it needs to be counted not on the person who says them and does not mean them, but on the people who said them and meant them and made people sensitized to them in the first place. It is the continued damage created by bigots, making words that in some situations are necessary to speak (or far too inconvenient to not use) painful to some because of their bigoted use. The rest of us can try to avoid them, but morality-wise, it looks to me more supererogatory for those in a position to do so rather than a moral obligation.

Could you rephrase this? I'm not sure what the main points were.

For those thinking it's crazy, consider how we assume seeing trigger warnings for rape etc before certain content are normal and approved in our societies.

It could be simply a cry for a trigger warning: this lecture may contain words which sound similar to words which cause trauma. Sounds okay to me.

I predict that you will see these trigger warnings before Chinese subtitled films, lectures which talks about the Chinese language at the very least within a year. The university is ahead of the curve, this is progress and a natural extension of current protections against reliving past trauma.

If trigger warnings in general are also considered crazy, to say so would get you instantly fired in every YC startup and silicon valley corporation.

if you're that sensitive you shouldn't try to learn about another culture

I just watched the video after reading the article, and the video -- if it's of the incident to which people were objecting -- wasn't as cringey as I expected it to be; however, I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

Maybe, if he saw the problem, he could've prefaced the example with warning, or otherwise acknowledged the sensitivity. I didn't get a sense that the offense was intentional.

The article had a comment that suggested someone didn't see how the similar sounds were a problem.

One reason I would suspect it's a problem (which I heard in a TV show, in which a character explains how an anti-gay slur is hurtful to them), is that they grew up hearing that slur hurled in the context of other injustices, from childhood.

I can also imagine that insensitivity to how hurtful a slur is could feel like a signal that someone doesn't understand or care about the associated injustices.

This hurtful mistake could be a learning moment for the professor, and maybe he could then help a lot of other people to also learn something constructive from it, and help everyone move forward in understanding and helping each other.

> I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

I’m learning Mandarin Chinese and consequently have use "nei-ge" quite a high number of times and I also happen to know English and it NEVER occured to me it is somehow related to the n-word before today. People who want to see racism could find everywhere anyway, it’s a lost battle.

Not using words that could be insulting in other languages is an impossible tasks and ridiculous thing to ask given how many of them there is.

> would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

People who aren't racist don't anticipate that kind of "problems" because we don't obsess about race. Furthermore, while the words may sound "problematic" to a non Chinese speaker, anyone with some fluency would probably not even notice the similarity.

Let's do an experiment. Read the following aloud (the louder the better), preferably to another person:

I AM SOFA KING! WE TADD DEED!

>I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

If you're speaking Mandarin you are going to hear this homophone with even less context than the professor is giving. Should professors slow down their lectures (which he did explaining the context) or compromise their education by simply not covering the topic to protect the sensibilities of adults?

>One reason I would suspect it's a problem (which I heard in a TV show, in which a character explains how an anti-gay slur is hurtful to them), is that they grew up hearing that slur hurled in the context of other injustices, from childhood. I can also imagine that insensitivity to how hurtful a slur is could feel like a signal that someone doesn't understand or care about the associated injustices.

Trigger warnings are not meaningfully helpful or harmful https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/216770261982701...

I've at least experienced hearing slurs in negative contexts, and people discussing them brashly without "contextualizing" it. Sometimes it's pretty jarring, sometimes it feels bad. I still have absolutely no patience for not even engaging in, but enforcing under threat to somebodies career that they engage in the practice of trigger warnings. That is just using peoples suffering to push a personal agenda which nominally will help other people but which evidence shows will not help other people.

Or you know, we could just tell these idiots to grow up or get therapy.

There was no malice intended here at all. If people can't even hear a word from another language that vaguely resembles a racial slur when used in a non malicious context then they probably need therapy. Not coddled.

>however, I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

The problem with that line of thinking is that there is no "problem" to begin with, aside from an inflated sense of entitlement from a group of outrage enthusiasts who believe context is irrelevant.

I think you need to be developmentally disabled to genuinely think that foreign language words that resemble curses in your language are offensive. It's not on the professor to do backflips to protect against people looking for excuses to get offended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com