Posts by Jolisa
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I'm coming around on the spelling... roflnui might be more linguistically pure, but rofflenui is very onomatopoeic. It tells you how to say it, in a user-friendly way. Hmm.
Is it a noun ("we had a right old rofflenui at that one") or a verb? If so,does it inflect for tense? ("I rofflenuid my &*%^ off").
Still holding out for Jen's expertise, but also deferring to Islander, who will be responsible for getting this word into the OED ere long!
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You know, as much as I love rofflenui, I'm really reluctant to support it as the Word of the Year, simply because - according to Google - it's never been used outside of PA System.
So is it the Public Address "Word of the Year," or the Public Address Word -- of the Year?
It would be cool to hatch a word, give it a press release, and send it off into the wild, eh?
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I'm hoping our resident linguistics prof Jen Hay will weigh in on the correct spelling of roflnui/rofflenui.
If it's all the same to Sacha the originator, I'm leaning towards the former.
Not just because of ennui, but also because I'm pretty sure Roff le Nui was a bandmate of Russ le Roq, back in the day. And if he wasn't, he should have been.
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"It won't be easy; you'll think it strange..."
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There you go, an excellent streetview-real world mashup. Like a gorilla-gram only techier.
Or you could organise a parade, if you were feeling kinder.
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Fascinating, some of the comments on the Colebatch thread have evaporated into thin air. At least, the one calling him a misogynist has.
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He's the first black president and the forty-fourth white president. I fail to see the semantic difficulty here.
Bravissimo!
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Also, it's mainly the "not-black" epithet that bugs me. The Americans that have expressed this view seem to infuse it with racist overtones.
Good call, Heather. Colin Powell would be another example, by virtue of his Jamaican parents, of the "not-black" (i.e. not descended from enslaved Africans) black person, who gets a pass by virtue of seeming/talking/emanating "white."
With Obama, it's almost as though some of those early modern discourses about noble African princes have leapfrogged a couple of centuries so as to give comfort and succour to those who find the notion of a 21st black president somewhat frightening and/or unnatural... but I'm getting flashbacks to grad school, and further derailing the discussion.
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You really want to try schooling me about the galaxy of "weird" miscegenation stirs up across the board?
Heavens no, not schooling (I've put that behind me), just agreeing with the others that your advanced critical race theory doesn't mesh easily with the conventional, quotidian, widely-accepted narratives of race according to which Obama is the first black president.
Which is dandy - you wouldn't want it any other way, and you're not wrong. Obama would probably be the first to agree with you. Strictly speaking, yes, he is the first readily identifiable, self-identified (ooh is that a problem?) mixed-race President (yay) and I think his first book speaks very strongly to an identity that straddles the categories and/or stakes out a new one.
Which, if we could name it, would bring us back to the subject o the thread.
(Do you think he smokes Virginia Slims? Or American Spirit?)
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I dunno, why? You went here:
What the hell is his mother -- some high yellow negress "passing" for white?
I understand your point (any identity-category terminology is a right old inaccurate bugbear), I just think it misses the point. Would you feel happier saying that Obama is the first mixed-race president? (But that would be historically inaccurate, I think).