I imagine it’s more that Marvel doesn’t want to let Sony play in the MCU without supervision.

“Imagine using the dictionary to look up definitions of words. It’s [current year!!]”

He’s not doing a history project. He’s pulling up a word’s definition for muppets like you.

These crackers are making me thirsty

“I’m not sure how much college you’ve under your belt, but the dictionary is not a valid source for ones history project.”

strangely and unexpectedly it IS a good source for the meaning of words.

enough of your history project.

Several people have now made this argument, and it makes no sense to me. A dictionary is a book listing a definition of words. That’s its purpose. To the extent you have more respect for academic journals, they have cited the Merriam-Webster dictionary (according to JSTOR) 4,621 times. Were those articles written by…

Precisely... which the cynic in me thinks is kinda the whole point of playing games with language this way. We’re not really talking about the natural evolution of language here... but targeted changes that seem to have the net result of reducing the amount of understanding in the world.

Yeah, and the wholesale adoption of this definition by a largely younger, largely very online group is definitely, from my observations, definitely leading to an understanding gap between them and people who are older and/or not as online in that way. So you have a generation of people with a particularly…

The problem, of course, is that racism refers to overarching power structures, not if an innocuous word made you feel bad.

I wasn’t doing a history project. I was commenting on the definition of a word, for a blog. That said, the Merriam-Webster dictionary is commonly cited by scholars.

Your proposed definition doesn’t make much sense in practice. Let’s say a person from one Asian ethnicity feels his people are inherently superior to members of another Asian ethnicities. (This is quite common.) So he thinks that members of the other ethnicity aren’t trustworthy, doesn’t want his kids marrying members…

That said cracker is absolutely not racist by the definition’s you’ve given above because it in no way, shape, or form implies superiority or inferiority and lacks historical context that would lend evidence to such accusations. In fact the belief that cracker is a racist term is more likely an indicator that the…

Didn’t the late, great Paul Mooney have an entire bit on this like 20 years ago? He’d list all the supposed “anti-white” “slurs” like “cracker”, “honky”, “white trash”, etc., and note that white people had never cared at all about being called any of them, and concluded that the appropriate derogatory term for whites…

The sentiment is that it’s a pejorative. It’s a racial epithet being used in a negative way. If you accept some and not others, then you’re deciding based on skin color. Do you know what kind of person evaluates value based on skin color?

“The problem, of course, is that racism refers to overarching power structures, not if an innocuous word made you feel bad.”

which mightn’t have been a big thing in the states but there was actual anti-irish prejudice up until the late eighties in Britain

Comedian John Mulaney puts it nicely - “When comparing the badness of two words, and you can’t say one of the words, that’s the worst one.”

“I have no idea why you would hire Hugh Laurie just to have him do an American accent instead of his natural British accent.”

Also fortunately: folks respected the concept of consent enough to remove the mods.