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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly this seems like its the same thing as you guys in the US not being able to say merry christmas because it might offend someone.

Is this a common perception of those outside the US about what goes on inside the US?

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Yes. I find it extremely funny/awkward that you say police person instead of policeman/woman, flight attendant instead of steward/stewardess, horizontally challenged instead of fat, can't say fuck on TV (but it's ok to carry guns and kill millions of innocent Afghans and support Israel's invasion of Palestine), that you can't drink under 18/21 (I don't know which one) not even if your parents are around (and you call your country "the land of the free"), that you can't watch certain movies in the cinema but there are action/murder movies on TV all the time, that you say African American when you actually mean all black people, in general that you put so much emphasis on the form but so little on the actual content.

Btw, I would never say flight attendant/horizontally challenged/... instead of the alternative, simply because it's longer, and I'm lazy.

I live in the US. I think most of those things happen a lot less than you think. To take what I think is the most extreme example, in the ~35 years that I've been parsing speech successfully, I don't think I've ever heard someone refer to a fat person as "horizontally challenged."

Maybe this stuff just happens on TV?

One exception: not saying "fuck" on TV. That's accurate and fucking insane.

It's also insane the amount of gore and violence allowed on TV and in movies, but show a little skin and you get fined.

The reason Family Guy has so many fight scenes is to prove how stupid the FCC's regulations on violence are compared to nudity.

For a while (a few decades back), ads for airlines were really sexist and promoted their stewardesses as sex objects. So replacing "stewardess" with "flight attendant" is for airlines to distance themselves from an actual, offensive practice.

It is a common perception that Americans are prudish and easily offended. In the UK at least.

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