Will all jocularity one day be forbidden?
"As an audiotape spread on the Internet, Alabama coach Nick Saban acknowledged Wednesday using a phrase considered derogatory to Cajuns but said he doesn't condone such language and merely was repeating something a friend told him..... Saban told of the friend's encounter with an LSU fan, who speaks in a Cajun dialect.
"He was walking down the street yesterday before the Sugar Bowl," Saban said on the taped comments. "He calls me. There was a guy working in the ditch, one of those coonass guys that talk funny. "I can't talk like them, but he can. Most people in Louisiana can."
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I gather that Cajuns are whites so somebody has goofed. Everybody knows you can't offend whites -- only "minorities".
A reader writes: "Living a mere hour from New Orleans, married to a woman hailing from Louisiana, and a graduate of LSU, I have never heard someone take offense at the term. My in-laws usually refer to themselves as coonasses...but the PC bunch take offense at everything"
Interesting that the term "Cajun" was once derogatory -- but no longer is. Whether a name is derogatory or not does seem to depend on whether the people concerned feel badly about being in that category. The term "reptiles of the press" was coined as a derogatory description of journalists but many journalists in Australia and Britain liked the term and now cheerfully refer to themselves as "reptiles".
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