Why are some xalimos such begs

[Cognitivedissonance]

Docile you say

How about being realistic

I'm not about to argue with every little nobody who views me as black, but if that's your thing then go right ahead sxb. I wish you luck on your meaningless quest.

I'm not from Scandinavia :siilaanyolaugh:

Out here in the uk there's white black asian Arab youths using Somali words in their lingo or tracks like bashaal, cuunto, askar. Mirqaan, warya..

 

[GlitzyCue_]

I bet you tell some of your friends that Somalis were enslaved too just to fit in you brown nosin buck dancing hair hatted black kkk

:siilaanyolaugh: Infact I always bring up the Arab slave trade just to fit in but the only problem is people question my authencity. Once upon a time I had an AA teacher tell me I was somali and not black and then a Arab store owner got mad I couldnt speak Arabic and the craziest of all a Mexican was like we're family and when he saw I was confused he asked if I was Indian.

 

[MadNomad]

I'm not from Scandinavia :siilaanyolaugh:

No, you're from the united kingdom of PakiAfrica. Your point? :siilaanyolaugh:

 

[Cognitivedissonance]

@Lola_Vonroe @MadNomad


The light and dark of language



Q: I teach cultural anthropology at the City University of New York. Some of my students have asked when the negative association with the color black first arose, as in “black sheep” or “black day” or “Black Death.” In other words, why is “angel food cake” white and “devil’s food cake” black? HELP!

A: This is a tall order!

It’s easy enough to say when some of the phrases you mention came into English. But it’s harder to tackle the notion of blackness or darkness as negative. This idea predated English and probably predated written language.

The word “black” has been in English since the earliest days of the language. In Old English in the eighth century it was written as blaec or blec, a word that was often confused with blac (white or shining).

The two words were even pronounced similarly at times, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Middle English (spoken roughly between 1100 and 1500), they were “often distinguishable only by the context, and sometimes not by that.”

The etymological history of “black” is difficult to trace, according to the OED, but it may have come from Old Teutonic roots that originally meant scorched or charred or burned. We can only speculate here. A prehistoric Indo-European root reconstructed as bhleg meant “burn.”

The oldest definition of “black” cited in the OEDis the optical one: “the total absence of colour, due to the absence or total absorption of light, as its opposite white arises from the reflection of all the rays of light.” This sense of the word was first recorded in writing in Beowulf in the 700s.

In the 1300s “black” was first used to mean soiled or stained with dirt, which the OEDdescribes as a literal usage.

It wasn’t until the late 1580s that “black” was used figuratively to mean “having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister,” according to the OED.

The published usages include “black curse” (1583); “black name” and “black Prince” (1599, Shakespeare); “blacke edict” and “blacke victory” (1640); “black moment” (1713); “black enemy” (1758); and “black augury” (1821, Byron).

Around the same time, “black” took on other negative meanings, including horribly wicked or atrocious, as in “blacke soule” (1581); “blacke works” (1592); “blackest criminals” (1692); “blackest Calumnies” (1713); “black ingratitude” (1738, Macaulay); “the blackest dye” (1749, Fielding); and “black lie” (1839).

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, “black” also became identified with sorrow, melancholy, gloom, and dire predictions; a “black” outlook was pessimistic, whereas “bright” meant hopeful.

The word “blackguard” originally referred to dirtiness rather than to evildoing. It originated about 1535, and according to the OED it was first used first to refer to a scullery or kitchen worker, someone who had charge of pots and pans.

“Blackguard” was later used to describe a street urchin who worked as a shoe-black. In 1725, Jonathan Swift wrote of “The little black-guard / Who gets very hard / His halfpence for cleaning your shoes.”

And a 1785 slang dictionary described a “black guard” as “a shabby dirty fellow; a term said to be derived from a number of dirty tattered and roguish boys, who attended at the horse guards … to black the boots and shoes of the soldiers, or to do any other dirty offices.”

Boys who picked up odd jobs in the streets were also called “blackguards,” and in 1736 the term was first used to mean a scoundrel.

“Blackmail,” first recorded in 1552, originally meant protection money.

The OED defines its first meaning as “tribute formerly exacted from farmers and small owners in the border counties of England and Scotland, and along the Highland border, by freebooting chiefs, in return for protection or immunity from plunder.”

In those days, “mail” meant rent or tribute (its ancestor, the Old English mal, meant payment extorted by threats). But we can’t find any explanation for the “black” in the term, aside from the term’s earlier sense of soiled or dirty.

The phrase “black sheep” has been used to mean a bad character since the 1790s; according to legend, there was one in every flock.

The term “blacklisted” was recorded as far back as 1437. The Chambers Dictionary of Etymologysuggests that the name indicated “edged with black.” The OED says the “black” in the term is from the negative sense of the word and means disgrace or censure.

However, the OED notes elsewhere that such a list was “often accompanied by some symbol actually black,” as in this 1840 citation from Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge: “Write Curzon down, Denounced. … Put a black cross against the name of Curzon.”

Similarly, a “black mark” (meaning a mark of censure) was originally “a black cross or other mark made against the name of a person who has incurred censure, penalty, etc.,” the OEDsays. The first published use is from a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845): “Won’t there be a black mark against you?”

As for the great plague of the 1300s, it wasn’t called the “Black Death” at the time. In the 14th century it was called “the pestilence,” “the plague,” “the great pestilence,” “the great death,” etc.

In English, the “black” wasn’t added until the early half of the 1800s, though it appeared in Swedish and Danish in the 1500s and in German in the 1700s.

The OED says it’s not known why the plague was called “black,” but The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says it was because the disease caused dark splotches on the victims’ skin.

We can’t find anything in standard etymologies about “devil’s food,” but it may get its name either from its original color (red), or from its heaviness and density as opposed to “angel food,” which is weightless and feathery. A website called The Straight Dope has a good entry on the subject.

The metaphors in question aren’t Western notions, either. From what I’ve been able to find out, they’ve been around since the beginning of time, when people first became aware of the division of their world into day and night, light and dark.

From the point of view of primitive people, day brought with it light, sun, warmth, and of course visibility. Night was colder and darker; it was threatening and fearful, full of unseen dangers and hidden threats.

This ancient opposition between day and night, light and dark, became a common motif in mythology. It’s unfortunate that dark-skinned people, merely by the accident of skin color, have become victims of the mythology.

We’ve found an article that might have some ideas for you to share with your students. In it, the psychiatrist Eric Berne explores the folklore of our conceptions of light and dark, black and white, good and evil, clean and dirty, and so on.

The article is “The Mythology of Dark and Fair: Psychiatric Use of Folklore,” published in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 72, No. 283 (Jan.-Mar., 1959), pp. 1-13. You can get it through JSTOR, assuming CUNY subscribes to its digital archive. Skip the first page and go to the history, which begins on page 2.

Berne notes that the ideas of light=goodness and dark=badness existed in ancient cultures (including Egyptian and Greek), and can be found in Asia and around the globe.

Joseph Campbell, writing in the journal Daedalus in 1959, says it was the Persian philosopher Zoroaster (circa 600 BC) who put the seal on the concept of darkness being evil.

Zoroaster, Campbell writes, saw a “radical separation of light and darkness, together with his assignment to each of an ethical value, the light being pure and good, the darkness foul and evil.”

The Old and New Testaments are full of such dichotomies. In later Christian writings, the bright angel Lucifer transgresses and is thrown out of heaven (which is, of course, flooded with light), to become the dark lord of night.

In Paradise Lost, Milton writes that the flames of hell produce “No light, but rather darkness visible.”

For what it’s worth, we don’t believe that metaphors identifying lightness as positive and darkness as negative are inherently racist. They certainly didn’t begin that way, though these negative connotations have certainly fed into and reinforced racism over the centuries.

Your students may also be interested in a recent item on The Grammarphobia Blog about the word “https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2009/11/when-nice-wasnt-nice.html” and its evolution (for some African-Americans) into a positive term through a process that has been called semantic bleaching.

The blog entry cites a paper by Arthur K. Spears, a linguist and anthropologist at CUNY. We’ll bet he could direct you to other sources of information about the mythology of blackness.

We hope some of this is useful to you.

 

[Mohamedali]

@PiratePrincess lets ride to the sunset b

 

[PiratePrincess]

@PiratePrincess lets ride to the sunset b

Wrong thread

 

[FarahAbdi]

Xalimos like to jump on the bandwagon

 

[Mohamedali]

Wrong thread

Oooooopss i want to know more about you

 

[PiratePrincess]

Oooooopss i want to know more about you

Wako daalee karaa, you may refer to me as edo com now on

 

[Mohamedali]

Wako daalee karaa, you may refer to me as edo com now on

You deserve a cock slap for your paigon movements nacalaa

 

[PiratePrincess]

You deserve a cock slap for your paigon movements nacalaa

You make it hard to ignore you when you say things like that..

 

[Mohamedali]

You make it hard to ignore you when you say things like that..

How can you when you crave it

 

[iyandi]

I bet you tell some of your friends that Somalis were enslaved too just to fit in you brown nosin buck dancing hair hatted black kkk

Ironic that in the post directly above this one you claim to have black friends. This disgusting rant says otherwise. No big whoop.....just outs you as either a liar or a fake.

 

[Cognitivedissonance]

Ironic that in the post directly above this one you claim to have black friends. This disgusting rant says otherwise. No big whoop.....just outs you as either a liar or a fake.

You jive turkey buck dancing knuckle dragging goose necking porch monkey niggardly knuckle dragging are we sick master materialistic docile baboon breathing all the white mans air baby King Kong

 

[Zeus]

This whole pan-african movement makes me sick to my stomach.

How can I be called black? My glowing mariin skin, my soft hair, and my pointy horner nose say otherwise.

 

[Tywin Mejerteen]

"MaryAn"

 

[John Michael]

You jive turkey buck dancing knuckle dragging goose necking porch monkey niggardly knuckle dragging are we sick master materialistic docile baboon breathing all the white mans air baby King Kong

How does such a young boy have so much hate?

 

[Cognitivedissonance]

How does such a young boy have so much hate?

I could ask you the same question why do you hate to be Somali so much so that you went out your way to call yourself john Micheal