Party Prep 10/22

15 April, 2020 18 Comments

oh no

Hyacinth: Anyway, I’m glad you could be here —

Leif: Yes! Thank you for having me!

Hyacinth: — and I want for you to know that I stand in solidity with your people!

Leif: In what? And, my who?

Hyacinth: I mean with all of Sønheim’s slaves!

Leif: O-okay, first of all, you should know that word is considered offensive —

Hyacinth: I understand! Because slavery is offensive!

18 Comments

Preach it sister.

Heh, really. I love her so extra much right now. 🙂

Honey, when someone tells you a word you used is offensive, you dont’t push back and tell them you have the authority to use it. Especially if you don’t belong to that group.

And in this goes double as the word that Hyacinth is using is a slur against an ethnic block: the Slavska people.

See Also: Younger-than-now-but-still-of-legal-majority leif’s first shock(All Green Thumbs, Page 3/13)
Hyacinth and Thorn discussing the fact that which words are slurs change between cultures, and ‘good people’ don’t automatically know the map to that minefield. ( Extremely Competent Uncle Thorn, page 6) Hyacinth is getting the other prong of that particular fork here.

To be fair, it’s extremely likely that Sønheim authorities worked hard on making sure that their language is ineffective in explaining how slavery is bad.

Eh, that’s a little too ‘Illuminati’ for my tastes. One of the BIG push backs Sønheim has culturally have is “You work. You get paid a fair wage.” Their Mythic Founding Heroine enshrined that into their laws. They must HAVE a word for Actual Chattel Slavery to exist in opposition to that concept.

Leif is a worst-case scenario that almost certainly doesn’t crop up that often, though I can totally believe that his case and cases like it are hushed up. By and large, Indentured Servants are ‘Temporarily-embarrassed’ citizens who go in, work a couple of years, and come back out.

It’s kinda hard to say something’s too Illuminati when there’s leeches walking around who can affect things over the course of centuries.

oh NO

How did Hyacinth learn that word without learning its ethnic connotations?

the same way she did not know that the Ceannic slur in translation was the go-to Polite Sønska word for the Iúilic(Iudska) people.

Thorn didn’t, either.

Because often we don’t know these things. Because nobody is born with knowledge, because these things are often systemic, because things can differ between groups, because things change.

It’s very easy to look up a word and get a short literal translation, with nothing about the implications, subtext, or etymology. Or maybe you’ll get a list of translation options, but zero sense of what the difference is, or how to pick which one is appropriate for a given situation.

And there are people who will make up reasons to be offended by a legitimate word. (US English, for instance, gets this a lot with “racist” and “cis”.) Hyacinth has just mis-identified whether that’s happening here. Which is also really easy to do in your second language.