The United States Census Bureau announced that Negro would be included on the 2010 United States Census, alongside “Black” and “African-American,” because some older Americans still self-identify with the term.
Wikipedia
In high school, we often had good laughs about the american way of saying everything “politically correct”. Change the name of something, because the old name has too many negative connotations. The only problem is, that until you use that new name for the same thing, or group of people, nothing will change. If that thing or group of people don’t change, those “negative connotations” will be back. Quick.
The same goes for the gipsies in Hungary, who have been campaigning to be called roma. I don’t have a problem with that, it’s their name for themselves in one of their languages. It feels good for me too when someone identifies me as “magyar” instead of “hungarian”. But in the case of roma as well, the new word started to gain the old word’s negative meanings. And that won’t change until there will be no place for negative preconceptions about that social group. (For some reason, jews apparently don’t care about their word being used as a swearword…)
Then, celebrations. I’ve heard about an american idea, that christmas should be called winter holiday instead, because the christian word isn’t appropriate for all the various religious holidays of that season. True, but. Christmas as-is has a tradition of at least a thousand years in western culture. And the States has its roots in a christian culture as well, how ever religiously unaligned it wants to be. In the jewish quarters of a big city, i guess i’d not see christmas celebrations. Whatever, long live the christmas creep.
I didn’t think it all through, before someone’d want to set me aflame.
