http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8243648.stm
It is sad that our language is being impoverished by political correctness and oversensitivity.
I wonder if sometimes people do this to see how much column inches they can get?
Who made this decision?
What a cock!
.
Do they serve Cock au Van (end of the evening for an Essex girl)?
One student canteen I went to ages ago had "Spanish Chicken" on the menu ... "Coq Espaņol" ...
(At least I think I remember it ... it seems a lot like the sort of thing the memory makes up out of wishful thinking.)
"Flintshire council canteen has renamed Spotted Dick pudding Spotted Richard to cut back on crude innuendo and jokes at meal times"
... mmm, can see how it won't be funny any more ...
Has anyone told them what Richard is rhyming slang for ... ?
(Clue: Deformed king in a Shakespeare play.)
As I understand this story, it has nothing to do with "political correctness gone mad" and everything to do with female staff getting fed up with sad blokes saying "can I have a spotted dick please? >snigger<"Originally Posted by Mulder
I'm not suprised that a Tory Councillor should erroneously start shouting "political correctness", but I'm unclear why you use the words when the story you link to gives a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Yeah, but they aint cockerneys are they mate?
Did you miss the '... and oversensitivity' bit? I rather like Spotted **** and will certainly never ask for Richard!, whatever they call it
No I didn't miss that bit. Calling it oversensitivity seems reasonable, although we haven't been on the receiving end of the childishness, perhaps you or I would be less tolerant of it if we had to endure it on a daily basis.
I still see no "political correctness", it's just a stupid phrase that bigots use to avoid having to think about things. I hear it all the time used to describe something that the complainer doesn't like, but on the rare occasions when it is actually used in context it is usually associated with a fictitious story, like "Baa, baa green sheep".
You mean you want the phrase 'politically incorrect' to become politically incorrect? Is there a newspeak word I should be using instead?
I intend to continue to use the phrase 'politically incorrectness' wherever I see it in action, no matter what that makes me!
I use political correctness to describe things that are changed to avoid supposed offence (even where, in many cases, there has been no complaint) despite the fact that such 'offence' relies on a misunderstanding. It is patronising, impoverishes the language and erodes the culture.
Spotted Dick has been around a long time and I see a few people being juvenile as no reason to change it.
Last edited by Mulder; 9th September 2009 at 03:09 PM.
found this whilst browsing :
The word "dick" has appeared in any number of strange places. Around the 1840s, "dick" was used to mean a type of hard cheese; when treacle sauce was added, it became "treacle dick", and finally when currants or raisins were added (looking like little spots), the "spotted_dick" was born.
The earliest recipes for spotted dick are from 1847. For non-British readers, "spotted_dick" is a boiled suet pudding, with bits of dried fruit (usually raisins or currants) that (as already noted) look like little spots.
The Oxford Companion to Food comments that, strictly speaking, "spotted_dick" is made by taking a flat sheet, spreading sugar and raisins on it, then rolling it up. A similar dessert is "spotted dog," a plain cylinder of suet paste with the raisins and currants and sugar stuck into it, so that the spots are visible on the outside. Both spotted dick and spotted dog were traditionally boiled (or even steamed) in a cloth, but nowadays they are usually baked.
They could just rename it to 'spotted dog'
You are saying that, even by your own strange definition of "political correctness", you used it out of context in this case. One canteen changed the name to avoid "immature comments"; they weren't trying to avoid offending anyone, it's not going to have any impact on the language or culture of anyone outside of that one canteen.
Can you actually give a genuine example of something that was changed to avoid supposed offence even though there has been no complaint? Quoting a Daily Mail "it's political correctness gone mad!" article doesn't count, I want a real one. I'm not saying that it never happens, but the overwhelming majority of alleged cases turn out to be untrue.
In the real world "political correctness" comes from authoritarian, anti-democratic political thinking, such as the American Republican Party, the Maoists and Stalinists. It is usually about causing offence, not trying to avoid it. A recent US example would be the attempt to re-name "French Fries" as "Freedom Fries", which is an old American tradition, during the First World War the Republicans tried to re-name "Sauerkraut" as "Liberty Cabbage".
When I was young it was only the Liberal and Trotskyist Left that used the phrase "politically correct". And they were using it to mock the Stalinists, never seriously. It's only in the 1980s that the tabloid newspapers picked up on the phrase and used it to attack people and organisations who were not bigots.
It would have caused a lot less fuss than the ridiculous "Spotted Richard" if they had done that in the first place.
There was a forum for an American spin-off of Scrapheap Challenge where the nannybot asterisked out dodgy words, including "Dick". Trouble is, the host of the show was Dick Strawbridge ... not to mention that at the time their vice president was one **** Cheney!
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks