Saturday, July 4, 2009

Offensive Words



a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_PddQ8xLinAc/Sj732KFAoTI/AAAAAAAAG3c/NYLbah2_p2I/s1600-h/kamus+dewan+from+the+star.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 125px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_PddQ8xLinAc/Sj732KFAoTI/AAAAAAAAG3c/NYLbah2_p2I/s200/kamus+dewan+from+the+star.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5349985917153091890" border="0" //aShould a racist word be dropped from a Malay dictionary?br /br /Malaysia's High Court a href="http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/5/18/nation/20090518140253amp;sec=nation"has dismissed an appeal/a from an Indian Muslim association to have the derogatory term span style="font-style: italic;"a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keling"keling/a/span dropped from its pages. In span style="font-style: italic;"The Star/span S.S. Yoga a href="http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2009/6/22/lifefocus/4092855amp;sec=lifefocus"looks at the colourful history of racist slurs in Malaysia/a a href="http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2009/6/22/lifefocus/4092858amp;sec=lifefocus"and around the world/a.br /br /Writers Kee Thuan Chye, Dina Zaman and Amir Muhammad are asked for their opinions and agree that the word should not be omitted from the dictionary but a href="http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2009/6/22/lifefocus/4092862amp;sec=lifefocus"should definitely be flagged as offensive/a.br /br /I agree too. We may not love all the words that are in a dictionary but to pretend that they don't exist is in a sense dishonest. It is important though that dictionary users know whether such words are acceptable or not.br /br /The example of the word nigger in English dictionaries is a good one. My span style="font-style: italic;"Oxford Concise Dictionary/span (the one I keep on my desk) has a special usage note which tells me that the word has :br /span style="font-style: italic;"/spanspan style="font-style: italic;"/spanblockquotespan style="font-style: italic;"... strong offensive connotations and is today one of the most racially offensive words in the /spanspan style="font-style: italic;"language ... /span/blockquoteWouldn't something like this work a href="http://sbmb.dbp.gov.my/knb/cariankata/ka_rujukan_kamus_dbp.aspx?KataKunci=kelingamp;Type=1"for the span style="font-style: italic;"Kamus Dewan/span/a?div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7912730-6392417532737496351?l=thebookaholic.blogspot.com'//div

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