Sick of having to be Politically Correct over nearly everything

[SickofThisCountry]

Dont want to cause some big debate but is anyone else on here getting sick to the back teeth of having to watch their p's and q's through fear of offending every tom, dick and harry.

call it what you like Frogman ...if your friends don't like it it is for you to consider why and either accommodate their feelings or be pig headed about it - not sure why you feel it's an example of PC gone mad though

gordyslovessheep That was brilliant..I cant move

Stewart Lee rules - fact

I am very pro pc and am sick to death of people, even teachers l kid you not or other professionals who should know better comparing my DGD (who has CF) to 'normal' children. She absolutely refuses to consider herself anything other than 'normal' and she just gets on with it. Then she overhears some halfwit saying 'Well, DGDsname did as well as the 'normal ' kids today' or whatever

google tells me about the grasstree

"The aborigines call it "balga," which means "black boy,""
e-how

wiki
"This name refers to the purported similarity in appearance of the trunked species to an Aboriginal boy holding an upright spear. Some people now consider this name to be offensive, or at least belonging to the past, preferring instead grasstree"

more reliable sources could be found, but on that evidence alone - it would prompt me to think that actually the name 'blackboy' could be offensive - and i would search further.

it can't therefore be compared to a blackboard - which was a black board - or a black coffee - which is a black coffee or a common black bird which at a distance appears to be a black bird.

Gawd sake...you want me to call them black men trees??

They are called black boy tree because their trunk is black and their "hair" is wild like a boy's.

If the tree looked like it was smoking a pipe and had greying hair then it might well have been called black man tree.

If the trunk was white they might have called it white man tree.

If the trunk had been white and curvaceous and beautiful and they called it white woman tree - would that have been a problem??

No one wants you to do anything - Frogman I think you are looking to be offended in a Jeremy Clarkson stylee :)

"They don't look like white boy trees or pink boy trees or yellow boy trees.................because they are black. Hence the name."

but given your own description above that the trunk is black and therefore looks like a black boy - i fail to understand how you cannot see this as offensive.

I repeat, I don't know if its offensive in Australia- is it?

In the UK, it would not be offensive to call it a black tree.

It would not be offensive to call it a boy tree.

It would be offensive to call it a black boy tree due to the historic connotations of calling black men 'boys' as a means to belittle and control them.

If you're looking for hard and fast logical rules in language, you will be sorely disappointed- all the examples you have would signify different things. Some would be offensive to some, others to others, some not at all. Complaining about how unfair that is is like nailing jelly to the wall. Language is organic, not a set of logical rules.

It would also be offensive in the UK to imply that black boys look like any sort of trees.

And before you ask, no, calling a black boy a black boy is not generally deemed to be offensive in the UK unless the context does not require his ethnicity to be stated.

Oh god don't start me off ! just thought of another one that people who should know better do. They describe her as 'oh you know -the little girl with CF' or 'that little girl who's poorly' or whatever - l overheard some mums at a party doing this - talking about her in terms of her condition instead of the little girl with the long hair or so and so's daughter or whatever, l actually tapped one on the shoulder once and told them her name - she was like this
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I enjoyed that clip, thanks gordy, but got unexpectedly tearful when he said for a whole school year the only Asian child in his class was referred to (by the teacher) as 'the black spot'. Imagine.

So I agree with that comedian, life is better for 'political correctness' and I liked his definition of it too.

Mumsnet appears to be full of rampant left wingers these days. Good night. I'm off to have a nice cup of tea outside next to my beautiful black boy tree.

Oh FFS it's a tree. It doesn't look anything like a boy, on account of being a fucking tree. There's no sacred eternal responsibility to preserve any particular name that has been attached to it at some point. Call it whatever you like, but be prepared for the fact that if some people know more than you apparently do about the history of racist terms, they might be offended by it, in a way they are not, I promise, likely to be offended by "blackbird". Your call as to what you do about that. On the basis of this thread I'm predicting you ranting and everybody else backing away.

Saying all that you know, there's a Black Boy Lane in North London and when I last looked it's still on the map and still being referred to as such. These things tend to be locally mediated and locally negotiated, they are rarely subject to the kind of universalized rules the "PC gawn mad" lot claim. It's just incredible to me how such tiny things get turned into enormous wounded points of principle, it borders on persecution complex.

"Mumsnet appears to be full of rampant left wingers these days"

Sadly not.

anyway what's that got to do with anything?

Oh good god, frogman. Your neighbours think it's off and they have lived there longer than you. When in Rome?

You are obviously a bit thick. And you can't cope with new terminology (do you still say brontosaurus, or Constantinople, or Mongoloid?)

I could say what I think you are without insulting/hurting other people but I will leave that for another post.

I don't think you can say 'a nice cup of tea' anymore.

Yes Madfirstlady there is a road called Whiteladies Rd and a Blackboy Hill in Bristol where l used to live and as far as l know they are still called same. Apparently there have been calls by various councils in the past to get them changed as they are non pc etc. but has always been voted against as the consensus was among black and white people that we shouldn't brush the citys shameful history of being a world slave trading centre under the carpet so we should keep these names on a 'lest we forget' basis.

That's very interesting, sudaname. And you know what, I bet to this day there are people living in places other than Bristol who heard about the debate in the news at the time and are still convinced that the street names DID actually get changed on account of PC gawn mad, and use it as an example of how they're not "allowed" to do/say xyz.

offensive

unfortunate

BAAAHA!

I would imagine that thoughtful white people in Australia would be incredibly careful about the language they used- the recent history of interactions between white Australians and the indiginous people is so very very shocking that anything that white people should be falling over themselves to do anything they can to mitigate the damage. And bearing in mind that in living memory, a white person would use the word "boy" to a native Australian man, even if he was old enough to be the white person"s grandfather, I would have thought that good manners, tact and sensitivity would show anyone that calling something a "black boy tree" is a bad idea.

And here it is. Did you move to Australia precisely because it was, as many Austalian people I know in London, " the South Africa that got away with it"? Because, thank whatever, it it getting massively better and leaving you behind.

So call your plants "cockless trees" or "oh-my-world-other-people-exist" trees, pick whichever one you like.

Or try "I am a racist twat".