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Comment by peter_l_downs | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what you meant by tarbaby but that's a pretty offensive term. HN is not the place for that kind of speech.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I gather he meant the colloquial meaning in most places of the world which is something to the tune of "Something best avoided rather than confronted.". I believe it originates from a story or fable as such.

However I assume you meant he was using it in the more offensive slang usage for african-american. Chances are he might not even know it has the connotation as it's pretty specific to America.

I'm an American who grew up in the deep South. I've been exposed to just about every racially derogatory term you can think of, in every direction, and I've never heard "tarbaby" used as anything but "a trap to avoid."

I'm all for keeping the discourse civil, but the term was clearly used in a nonracial fashion. Please don't destroy perfectly useful words in an attempt to act offended on someone else's behalf.

Here is your story or fable as such:

(2004 retelling) http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/07/brer_rabbit_mee...

(1886 version) http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Uncle_Remus:_His_Songs_and_His...

Nobody uses "tar baby" as a slur in America. It's like "niggardly" - ignorant people use an incorrect interpretation to try to shut down people they don't like.

That said, you'd have to be crazy to use "niggardly" now after the reaction it got whoever that was. If you use words that most of your audience doesn't know, what does it say about you? :)

I don't know what you meant by tarbaby

If you don't know what a word means, the first step is to check the dictionary! "tar baby: a difficult problem that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it".

I didn't know what varelse meant by tarbaby. Try googling "tarbaby team" and seeing what comes up.

That being said, I'm clearly in the wrong, sorry for having been a dick. I know the phrase tarbaby, I'd just never heard of a "tarbaby team" before and was thrown off.

Do not do an image search for "meconium".

If you do, however, you might get new insight into the term "tar baby" and why it has that definition.

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