Same. I thought it was used as a joke.
Americans usually laugh if they get referred to as “Yanks” or “Yankee”.
Thats so retro.
You get mad at a Canadian…
“You…you…Canuck!”
It just doesn’t sound bad to me. Just silly.
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Growing up in the midwest I first heard Yankee in the context of the song Yankee Doodle, then NY Yankees baseball team. Later, in the Yankee/Rebel context of Civil War history, and then Yank as a British slang for US soldier (perhaps in WWII context, maybe WWI - doughboy more attached particularly to WWI). Never heard the derivation of the word. The Spanish “yanqui” is clearly used in a negative sense almost exclusively.
Not sure how accurate, but in the (WWII) movie Australia, they refer to American soldiers as Yanks, but it’s not derogatory in the movie (which certainly doesn’t shy away from other pejoratives).
It was common when I was growing up. Americans were Yanks, British were Poms and New Zealanders were Kiwis. We didn’t have a special term for Canadians (they sound just like Americans to Australian ears) and most other nationalities we used their official terms.
Lol at Poms. I was just thinking back to when I worked for a British company. The Australians I knew there always referred to the British as whinging poms. I thought that was hilarious.
How do you set the font to white here? I was going to add to that “And accurate.”
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I heard Poms used the first time I went to Australia on business many years ago. It seemed strange for them to use it as the persons using it were all of British ancestry!
There are so many nicknames for the Brits: limeys and rosbifs are probably more negative than poms.
LOL. Today I learned…
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Power dynamics matter.
When the British derived this slur towards the Pakastani people they were opressing, it wasn’t done just to save savs some time.
Again. It was not derived as a slur, it became a slur. People from Uzbekistan are called Uzbeks, Afghanistan Afghans/Afghanis, Kyrgyzistan Kyrgyz, Kazakhstan Kazakhs, Turkmenistan Turkmen, Tajikstan Tajiks. People from Finland are called Finns, Scotland Scots, Poland Poles, Switzerland Swiss, Thailand Thais.
Are those all slurs derived by the British oppressors? It’s literally a shortening of the name of the country, which means “land of the Paks” and was later appropriated by racists in UK to refer to people from south Asia.
Is it possible to get mad at Canadians?
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There are a few examples…
Case in point:
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Did the term “paki” exist before the british used it?
You seem very certain it was a common term that existed before it was a derogatory term used by the British.
The name “Pakistan” was invented in the UK in the 1930s (initially as Pakstan) so I believe the answer would be no.
From Wikipedia -
"Choudhry Rahmat Ali …is credited with creating the name Pakistan … when he was a law student at the University of Cambridge in 1933..The ideas did not find favour with the delegates or any of the politicians for close to a decade. They were dismissed as students’ ideas. But by 1940, the Muslim politics in the subcontinent came around to accept them. leading to the Lahore Resolution of the All-India Muslim League which was immediately dubbed the “Pakistan resolution” in the Press..
It means the land of the Paks – the spiritually pure and clean… The word ‘Pakstan’ referred to “the five Northern units of India, viz., Punjab(British_India)), North-West Frontier Province (Afghania, Kashmir Sindh and Baluchistan”
With all the other -stans, in the English language (I can’t comment on other languages) a person from that country is/was a shortening of that name, with the “stan” (“land”) removed. It wouldn’t make sense to have such a shortening for a person from Pakistan to have been created as a derogatory term while the other six were not (unless you believe they are too). I can’t see that adding an “i” to Pak is inherently derogatory, just as Afghan and Afghani were interchangeable for a long time and also given that the name proposed for the country was changed from Pakstan to Pakistan. I have no information on how it was first used but shortening it in such a way is consistent with all the other names.
It was not documented as being a racist term until the 1960s, so I’m guessing it was initially used in the 1940s in a non-derogatory way. I’m not certain about early usage (early usage of any term in the English language is rarely documented) and I wouldn’t refer to it as a common term in those first two decades given how new the country is. “Paki” is now considered a slur because of its association with the racist gang violence directed against South Asian/Middle Eastern ethnicities in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Thank you for proving my point.
I have lived in many countries, and Americans now tend to be very sensitive about these things. Far more so than they ever used to (my own view of this is the US is now more internally polarised that it ever used to be so these types of conversations end up being problematic).
Aussies are a lot more laid back about this sort of thing. Same with Kiwis.
Its a cultural thing. Its neither right or wrong, its just how society works there.
Also, the US is more of a melting pot than almost any country in the world. In NYC alone there are over 200 languages spoken.
There was a lot of immigration from commonwealth countries to the UK starting in the 1960s (for reconstruction purposes post-WWII). You have probably heard of the Windrush generation. These were folks from the Carribean that came to the UK starting in the 1960s.
So what happened over the last few decades is that the various ethnicities that came over (Jamaican, Indian, Paskistani, Bangladeshi etc) coalesced into various locations around the UK. These folks were mostly far down the socio-economic ladder.
And as you can imagine the mostly white population in the UK (also lower income) did not react well to having these folks around, as well as having to compete for more limited resources.
“Paki” as an insult kind of emerged from there. Its white on non-white racism essentially.
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Apparently, it’s possible to smugly tell them that they can’t understand terrorism.
Having never dealt with it personally, they can only see it as abstraction, and therefore can’t see how war begets war in the same way as a privileged Englishman.
I don’t think I have been called an “Englishman” before…
Thats a first for me.
I am an “International Person” really, with US, Canadian, Norwegian, UK, and Spanish roots.
And yes, I have seen terrorism up close and personal in Spain (ETA), which is why I can comment on the matter.