Michele Aaron, professor of film and television studies at the University of Warwick, said in an email that taking steps to address inappropriate content in old movies was “invaluable as part of a recalibration of society as anti-racist,” including the removal of racist words....
What is the context of the word in that film? I had to look elsewhere to find out that the character Admiral Boom uses the word to refer to chimney sweeps. So... it's not just the word. It's the idea that it's funny when a white person, because of a coating of soot, is seen as resembling a black person. I can't remember the movie enough to know whether, in context, Admiral Boom is an unsavory character and not someone to emulate. Don't all kids watching "Mary Poppins" empathize with the chimney sweeps? But black people are collateral victims. If someone insults X by saying X looks like Y, both X and Y are insulted, and our well-established love for X does not save Y from the insult.
Here's the Wikipedia article for "Hottentot." We're told the word appears in the names of many plants and animals. There are Hottentot hunting dogs and fish called hottentots. There's a hottentot-fig and a "hottentot cabbage."
And it's in the Cowardly Lion's "Courage" song in "The Wizard of Oz": "What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the 'ape' in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got?"
And then there's Tom Lehrer's "We Will All Go Together When We Go":
And we will all go together when we goThat's from 1959. We don't use those words anymore. But Tom Lehrer, born in 1928, is still alive.
Every Hottentot and every Eskimo
When the air becomes uraneous
We will all go simultaneous
Yes, we all will go together
When we all go together
Yes, we all will go together when we go
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67 comments:
You've got mud all over your face. You're a big disgrace.
The diverse emanations of critical racists' theory.
Abort them all, and call it progress.
Admiral Bloom was an old man, portrayed as silly, out-of-date, and out-of-touch. He had a cannon on his roof, which he used to shoot at the dancing chimney-sweeps.
He is a character to be laughed at, not emulated. And not one these impressionable children would know or care what a Hottentot is. It's just a funny word that's fun to say.
They're creating a problem in order to puff them selves up in fake importance by "solving" it.
"We don't use those words anymore."
What? Which words? "Uraneous"?
Well I certainly use the words Eskimo and apricot. I'd probably use the word Hottentot rather than Khoikhoi if I ever had occasion, but in 7 decades I never have. A word means what I want it to mean, no more, no less. Not what someone else decides they want it to mean.
Oh boy. Wait till the kids get a load of Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy. What does that get? NC-17?
Oh, you mean "Hottentot"? "Eskimo"? It seems clear that Lehrer's intent was to emphasize their blamelessness in the nuclear Gotterdamerung arrranged by their pale-faced distant relatives. Which hardly seems pejorative. But last I checked, we do still use those words.
Or is this maybe an announcement? Are you declaring that henceforth, in addition to the deeply offensive N word, you also find the H word and the E word offensive, and hope that all decent commenters will eschew them? In addition to "Jigger", I have to write "Jottentot", and "Jeskimo"? It's getting complicated, maybe you should publish a list of the widely understood words that must never be employed. Are there only 26 of them? I suppose I can manage that. But wait, didn't you just use them both? How confusing. Or perhaps, how confused.
I guarantee you that Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke had a 'thing'. They apparently met at dance rehearsals for Mary Poppins, and a woman doesn't make gestures like the one at 1:52 unless they want to jump your bones like a Russian acrobat pommels a pommel horse. Would investigating that backstory get a 'parental guidance' tag too?
I dare anyone to query 100 people what the word 'Hottentot' means. I'm betting it's less than 5%.
The objective is to set a narrative and get everyone to abide by it. Abiding by it without understanding why is an even bigger prize.
"What makes the Hottentot so hot?"
Change the rating? That's it? Parents can't be trusted with a menacing word like Hottentot? At the very least they need to bleep it.
We must search the cultural navel for even the tiniest grain of sand using a pickaxe.
Another back... black hole... whore h/t NAACP and non-profit corporate funding cycle. Take a knee, beg, donate.
@Jupiter: In addition to "Jigger", I have to write "Jottentot", and "Jeskimo"?
As with Jurassic Park dinosaurs and Cockney rhyming slang, there are always work arounds.
In some discussions "Jogger" doesn't mean what you think it means, yet it is so widely used elsewhere that it escapes every filtering effort.
I once worked with a fellow who constantly complained about the inadequate air conditioning in our building. The owner one day said to him, "I'll get you a Ubangi to stand there and fan you if you'll shut up." I doubt any of us knew what a Ubangi was, but it would probably be a R-rated workplace today.
So what are we not supposed to call these? Root'n'toots?
Good lord! What next!
And what are we to call the Hottentot Venus? Besides steatopygous? Or should that be Jeatopygous? Is this like Jig-pay Jatin-Lay?
...the recalibration of society as anti-racist...
The people have not reached consensus on what constitutes "racism." There's nuance.
The people have not reached consensus on the best way to counter racism. There's nuance there, too.
No one is qualified or authorized to lead the "recalibration of society" on this or any single topic. But it's happening anyway.
I make it a point to use politically incorrect, "we don't use those anymore" words when they are approriate to the context. Everyone should. They are nonsense and should be called out as such. It's simple: Do not let other people tell you how to speak - especially when what they are demanding is ahistorical or harebrained gibberish.
Meanwhile - at the local Government run school - you can find books in the grade school and middle school library on explicit gay sex.
but we better be worried about a silly movie created in 1964.
Black woman with huge butt.
What's weird is that kids were so much stronger in 1964 and adults were so much more intelligent.
Education has certainly done a number on Western Civilization. We won't recognize it in another 10 years.
I don't know what a Hottentot is, but I assumed it was some kind of German. Maybe a soldier. Or a wild child, like a Katzenjammer kid.
When I watched "Poppins" as a child, I had no google to look up the meaning of Hottentot. Maybe now, when anyone could find the definition of an old offensive word, cleaning up the classics is worthwhile. I prefer leaving the word as a relic, though. There is no way to make Butterfly McQueen's portrayal in GWTW palatable. Good. Let the current era see what people of the past believed. Some day the pieties of this era will scandalize future cultures. Instead of correcting art as if your opinions will last forever, have some humility.
But that's the difference between "progressive" -- a process that always moves forward, leaving mistakes in the dust of history -- and "conservative" -- a process that spirals, taking us back over mistakes so we can learn and change as everything comes around again.
Hottentot (n.)
1670s, from South African Dutch, said in old Dutch sources to be a word that means "stammerer," from hot en tot "hot and tot," nonsense words imitative of stammering. The word was applied to the people for the clicking, jerking quality of Khoisan speech.
- etymonline.com
South African genocide in progress, first the people, then their culture. Demos-cracy is aborted in a progressive religion.
As if anyone is going to pay attention to ratings of a 1964 movie.
A prof who has never made a movie or a TV show:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/film/staff/aaron/
“Over the last decade, I have delivered intensive ‘smart phone filmmaking’ courses: with A' Level students in 2013 and 2014, with university students in the West Bank in 2016 and 2017, and with activists in Coventry associated with the secondary mental health service, the Pod on 2021. “
Not impressive.
i'm reading a history of the 1920's (that was written in the 1930's)..
Did you know? that in the early 1920's, the demand for Eskimo pies caused a spike in cocoa bean futures?
People were gobbling them up like crazy..
Makes me wonder? Do people still eat Inuit Pies? or did the brand just disappear?
ps. Have you ever heard of, or even SEEN, an Edy's Pie? Me NEITHER
That was fantastic click bait Althouse. I clicked through for the answer.
I’m sure hottentot was in the film because it’s a funny word. Leave it in, the kid that Mary Poppins helped probably died horribly in WW1 anyway. His father was a Banker, not a Noble.
There was a time not so long ago when you couldn’t say on American television that someone had balls, but you could say that so-and-so had “cojones”…because “Americans don’t really know what it means anyway.”
When dukes and maharajas
Pass the time of day with me
I say me magic word
And then they ask me out to tea.
Supercalifra...
I always liked that lyric, if not the rest of the song.
(I grew up in Danville, IL, as did the Van Dyke brothers. My father knew their father, who went by "Cookie".)
@n.n The word was applied to the people for the clicking, jerking quality of Khoisan speech.
I'm not one to defend the colonialists, but by that standard must "honky" be flagged or censored in all media for the stereotype that white people honk their car horns? Must "redneck" be flagged for its original meaning (the red bandanas of an obsolete gang) or the modern one (stupid white people with sunburned necks)? Must every mention of an Oriental rug receive a trigger warning because of a now obsolete association with Asians? And let's not get started on the non-Egyptian migrant people once called Gypsies by illiterate European peasants.
How much content will be re-rated? How much of this will now be described as "micro aggressions" despite the ignorance of the original speakers, let alone ignorance centuries later?
Demanding that (poorly educated and ahistorical) modern speakers know the meaning of Hottentot or any other archaic term that was adopted and that went obsolete should be a very, very, very, very low social justice priority. Paralysis by analysis.
That movie is practically perfect in every way.
Let me know when the University of Wisconsin discovers a "Hottentot Rock" on campus and orders that it be moved.
Wasn't "Hottentot Rock" a 1950's pop song?
Progressivism = Word Police.
Sexism will be replaced with genderism in a nod to the transgender spectrum. Men will gawk at girls in sanctuary washrooms. Carbon-based life-forms will be sequestered to realize Net-Zero.
I named a dog Hottentot.
I've seen this movie hundreds of times and never even noticed he said the word "Hottentot". Never heard of it or knew what it meant. So I thank this Puritan to bringing this word out of the darkness and into the light of our modern society. Now, we have a new word to use when we want to piss off woke idiots.
White when they mean albino. Rainbow in human context that is a placeholder for albinophobia. Fetus to socially distance from human lives deemed unworthy of life. We'll be clicking and jerking our way to an authoritarian utopia.
The level of actual racial prejudice is inversely proportional to the amount of anti-racist recalibration happening. One goes down, the other goes up, like a teeter-totter. In this case, a Hottentot teeter-totter.
The semantic authoritarians need to crack open the urban dictionary, the psycho-atric tome, etc. Net-Zero is an ambitious goal, but a viable aggression.
Thank God it was Dick Van Dyke who played the part and not Sydney Poitier.
The movie would have been banned years ago.
Liberals are sick.
Now do Blazing Saddles...
'Meanwhile - at the local Government run school - you can find books in the grade school and middle school library on explicit gay sex.'
This is because liberals run all of the schools, and the same liberals are keen on grooming your children and pushing them toward queerness at all cost.
I admit the word skipped by me when I watched Mary Poppins long ago. But I do remember the Cowardly Lion use the term. Didn't know what it meant. Didn't care. Still don't.
But the warning that a film contains "smoking" well now THAT should be the death knell for a flick....
Behold the modern left, censors of society.
Don Quixote wouldn't have felt so good unless he found some giants to slay.
Wankers.
must "honky" be flagged or censored in all media for the stereotype that white people honk their car horns?
========
flustered colleague explained to me that honking was specifically when whitey picked up thier black ho's
The last use of the word that I recall was in Jim Dale's musical, Barnum in 1980.
P.T. Barnum sings the following line about the attractions in his new "museum:" "Hottentots we've gotten in forgotten spots, a cotton gin, a night with Lot in Sodom. Better see that twice!"
I never knew what Hottentot meant but thought it might be similar to Huguenot.
Spanish, Chinese, and many other languages are replete with insulting and derogatory exonyms for Americans, Englishmen, and white people in general. Nobody seems much bothered by them, including the white people.
White privilege is the ability to laugh at being called a "foreign devil" by a foreign devil.
"Eskimo" is not offensive to most members of the Yupik people, at least in Alaska. They much prefer it to being mis-labeled by sanctimonious white leftists as "Inuit" or "Aleut", who are related peoples but not at all the same thing as the Yupik.
Oh boy. Wait till the kids get a load of Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy. What does that get? NC-17?
I have a cousin who teaches in England and once mentioned that reading anything from Kipling to a class of schoolchildren would probably cost a teacher his job.
Even such innocuous animal tales as "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" include accurate vignettes of life under the Raj and are therefore considered pro-colonialist.
I doubt any of us knew what a Ubangi was, but it would probably be a R-rated workplace today.
I recall in 8th or 9th grade, as we were all beginning to experience the unfolding wonders of sexuality, there was a catch-phrase among the popular girls' clique. If one of them asked you the question "Ubangi?" you were expected to answer "You betcha!" and that would be enough to win her favor. I vividly recall being subjected to this interrogation by a comely young lady named Randi, whom I had long admired from afar, and correctly answering with the code phrase. I would eagerly have followed through if that was how the game was played, but to my dismay it seems to have been only a silly adolescent shibboleth.
Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class bigotry) (e.g. DEI)
Critical Racists' Theory (CRT)
Pro-Choice ethical religion of progressive sects
Social justice... anywhere is injustice everywhere.
[Ethnic] Spring
Affirmative action... discrimination
The much more culturally relevant question involving the Hottentots is whether butt implants constitute cultural appropriation.
I spent 10 minutes trying figure this out. . . .Or, am I supposed to have geared up and went into the Urban Dictionary? Is that why dictionaries do a tap dance not to offend?
Someone needs to splain it to me.
@Hassayamper
Fuzzy Wuzzy...
Ubangi...
Wait till they get a load George Allen's Macaca!
Viva Tom Lehrer! Woohoo!
'A spoonful of sugar...'
wink wink
I think people who troll through old movies looking for DEI offenses are just working on their careers. "I swear I will adhere to the DEI loyalty oath, including an intention to always join the day's hate pile-on." For bonus points, find a DEI offense in a fellow worker's teen-age tweets or in a beloved classic. Attach documentation (media clip URLs, Facebook news clips, etc.) to your resume.
"I'll get you a Ubangi to stand there and fan you if you'll shut up."
The "Ubangi Stomp" was a pretty good John Prine song, about a modern dance based on the Ubangi tradition, I supposed. But "The Ubangi Stomp in the Ubangi style, the beat just drives the cool cats wild."
So John was a racist.
What makes the hottentot so hot?
What puts the ape in apricot?
What've they got that I ain't got?
Racism.
I see that Ubangi stomp was written by Charles Underwood and recorded by Warren Smith in 1956, so Prine just did a cover.
"The objective is to set a narrative and get everyone to abide by it. Abiding by it without understanding why is an even bigger prize."
"Masking up" is wondering where its prize is.
Tommy D asks:
"Wasn't "Hottentot Rock" a 1950's pop song?"
No, but Carl Mann recorded a jumpin' ditty called "Ubangi Stomp."
"What makes the hottentot so hot?
What puts the ape in apricot?
What've they got that I ain't got?
Racism."
Most excellent. Underrated comment.
In Canada, the TV station that does old movies has a warning they show at some movies that goes something like this: "[T]his film depicts language and attitudes that were wrong then and are wrong now..." Wrong then and wrong now! It must be difficult to believe oneself to be at the pinnacle of human evolution, and yet to be so full of it. But one must grant our superiors their due for trying so hard.
I've been reading Flash for Freedom! lately. The cover alone would make that professors head explode.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_for_Freedom!
Besides, the kids are watching porn on their phones, not Mary Poppins.
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