Asians outraged by Army headline that had nothing to do with them
This is from the National Review and it’s about an army.mil headline that read “Chinks in special ops’ digital and physical armor poses challenges”. And, as you can see from the screen shots of the Tweets above, the illiterate masses took offense at the use of the word “chinks” which is defined in everyone’s English dictionary as “A narrow opening, such as a crack or fissure.” Well, unless you’re an ignorant moron, of course and begging to be outraged.
TSO can attest to the fact that I actually have a suit of armor. I don’t know if there are any “fissures or cracks” in it, but I can assure you that there are no Asians in my armor.
Category: Dumbass Bullshit
With a nod to Billy Currington: “God is great, Beer is good, and people are STUPID.”
Out.
Makes me fondly remember my college roommate. He was Vietnamese and said he was a “Nip.” I replied that the correct term was “Gook.” We argued a bit and decided that a Nip could refer to an Americanized Gook and all was right in the world.
I don’t know why, but I love this. I wish I had been there to hear it.
LOL!
NR Pax…I too would like to have been a fly on your wall for that debate.
Nip, as in Nippon, as in Japanese ? That must have been some discussion. How drunk were you both ?
What? You left out ‘slant’?
How drunk were you two?
Should have come back here sooner for the follow up.
The quick answers are this: We were both sober and we had a sense of humor. This is the man that came back to our room to find out that I had strung up holiday lights for Columbus Day. I said “Happy White Oppressor Day!”
His response: “I thought that was every day.”
Didn’t occur to me to break out slant though. Bummer.
As you all may recall, Mrs. Whitey is Asian, specifically (very, very hot) Cambodian with 25% Chinese in her family tree, thus giving our daughter the all-American racial mix of Irish-Cambodian, with a little German thrown in for flavor–many comparisons have been drawn to the “You’re Scottish-Korean, laddie!” skittles commercial, and to the cast of “Sullivan & Son.” The extended family of in-laws adds Black, Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican, and Armenian to the cultural pot. In-family racial jokes are a staple. I first caught on to this while we were on our way to a double date with some friends several years ago. My wife (then-girlfriend) was looking in the sun visor mirror and complaining about her makeup. I replied that she looked fine. I about crapped myself when she responded, “I look CHINKY!” I stuttered something to the effect of, “You can’t say that!” Her reply was simply, “Yes I can!” Ons of the friends we were going to meet was Chinese… Her pet name for me is “Sawh’,” which means “Whitey” (non-pejorative racial context) in Khmer. Most of her sisters call me that as well (but not my mother-in-law, God bless her, who weirdly enough tries very hard to pronounce my actual first name rather than anything in her native tongue). When my daughter was born, her hospital bracelet had our last name (White) followed by her gender: White, girl. All of my in-laws immediately nicknamed her “White Girl” in both languages (again, except for my mother-in-law, who purely adores her grandchildren). My low tolerance for hot (spicy) food is fair game for jokes, racial, practical, and otherwise. Any interaction with my Vietnamese sister-in-law will invariably involve someone joking with her about barbecuing a dog (apparently something Cambodians don’t do–my mother-in-law loves her dogs as much as her grandkids), and her replying that her family only eats cats (insert applicable ALF reference here), usually followed up by a “Fuck you, white boy!” thrown my way, regardless of whether I was involved or not, because I’m an easy target. And when my Black brother-in-law weighs in, all bets are off.… Read more »
Sounds like your family get togethers are a hoot!
My grandparents had a derogatory name for everyone, including each other. To Grandpa, Grandma was a WOP or a Dego, to Grandma, Grandpa was a Kraut. All of their friends did the same thing. When my parents were stationed in Japan (where my sister and I were born), they became good friends with a Japanese family. When Grandma went over to help when I was born, she also befriended the family and stayed in touch with them for years after my parents returned. But they were still called Japs.
People are entirely too thin-skinned and over-sensitive these days. Take Benedict Cumberbatch being raked over the coals for saying ‘colored’ instead of black. And God help the poor man, his 3rd great-grandfather owned a plantation with slaves in Barbados in the 18th century. He has automatically been tarred (is that racist?) with the ‘racist’ brush.
I don’t need to comment on the utter stupidity and ignorance of those who don’t know the actual definition of English words.
“I won’t even touch the levels of political incorrectness that I participate in at work. I was once (proudly) thrown out of my department’s yearly mandatory EEO training, and they didn’t bother trying to put me through it again for five years.”
That training must not be very “mandatory” if you can avoid it for 5 years. Where I work, we HAVE to participate in annual B.S. “diversity training.” Refuse, or take pains to avoid it, and you are terminated.
It’s a big organization and things occasionally slip through the administrative cracks. I just got to be one of those things for a few years, either by accident or (probably) design. Not anymore, unfortunately, because each EEO class is 4 hours of my life that I’ll never get back. But it was nice while it lasted.
The class that I was thrown out of ended (for me) with the words, “Get the fuck outta here, you little shit!” from the instructor. Honestly, it’s one of the prouder moments of my life!
My point is about Zipper Heads is:
zipper + head.
From the leather helmets formerly used by early Canadian armoured crewmen, with a pattern of stitching resembling a zipper. There is also a folk etymology referring to the zippers on armoured-vehicle crew suits (re-purposed flight suits).
Noun
zipperhead (plural zipperheads)
(Canada, military slang) A soldier in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps or in the Armoured Crewman military trade.
Synonyms
trooper
crewman, tanker, armoured crewman, armoured soldier
tread-head, treadhead
References
Edward C. Russell (1980), Customs and Traditions of the Canadian Armed Forces, Deneau and Greenberg, Department of National Defence, ISBN 0888790279, p 65.
I am Irish and therefore, I am offended with Mr. Jagger’s first name.
The Asians bitching above are morons and an embarrassment to the human race!
What are you bitching about?
My last name is a simple Scots name, but it has been chewed up, mispronounced, misspelled and turned into a salad by so many marones that I don’t want to use it any more.
So I’m changing it: to Profumius-Bandersnatch. The hyphen makes it ‘special’.
That should stop ’em.
Hooray! For the Alice In Wonderland reference!
Nah! You got it all wrong, Master Chief. A zipper head is a dope-smoking soldier whose hair is long (yet barely in conformance) and he parts it down the middle.
Disproving the racist stereotype that Asian Americans are smarter than the rest of us. 😀
propsguy…That’s what I was thinking. In fact I thought maybe they have it over us in ability to learn which I am not even sure of but we have them in common sense in spades. I mean in…aw heck, here we go again.
Precisely
Every bell curve has its left-hand tail.
The army.mil headline was changed – “Unprecedented technology poses challenges for special ops”
Just another example of an organization bowing at the alter of political correctness when some illiterate moron misunderstands correct, standard English and throws a fit.
Maybe we should start complaining that the terms “reporter” and “journalist” are terms offensive to those who love freedom because they have connotations of being a police-state informant and spy, respectively. Ditto the term “liberal” – after all, it was one of the KGB’s code names for Julius Rosenberg. (smile)
It would seem that army.mil “re-nigged” on using chinks. Ooops.
Yep … With the correction to the article title, this situation is all “spic and span.”.
I’m sure they think the new title was a cracker jack solution.
musta had a nip in the air
I am a regular reader of this blog. I am not a veteran. This my first and possibly only comment submitted. I hope that what I say has some validity. I have always assumed that the term “nip” started as short for Nipponese in WW2 in reference to Japanese just like “jap”.
Actually, Richard, what is derives from is the US Navy, specifically a ship on duty in the Aleutians in 1942. On deck, someone said there was a nip in the air just as a fighter flew within eyesight of the ship. Well, another sailor heard “nip in the air,” saw the plane, and the rest, as they say, is history. True story. (And, hey, don’t be bashful. If you’ve got something to say about anything, well, look around here: You can’t do any worse than most of us.)
A Doggie telling sea stories??!! Fucked it straight up, too. Everyone knows a true sea story always begins with, “Now this ain’t no shit…” not to be confused with a fairy tale. They start “Once upon a time…”.
Just like Army tales.
Hey, I’m a lifelong civilian too, and they haven’t kicked me out yet–though I’m sure it’s crossed Jonn’s and Hondo’s minds once or twice…
Dude. I’m the canary in that coal mine. As long as they let me run my gob here, you’re safe.
Let’s face it, if they were right about the article and Chinese people were being used as armor by special operations , racial slurs would be the least horrific thing going on
I don’t care who you are. That there was funny!
Well, many Asians now that have been in the US any length of time have learned to play the race card, and whine about perceived slights, just as well as other groups who have been doing it for decades.
The non-Asians who are whining about the term “chink,” and don’t understand the context of the headline, are the biggest morons of all.
I’m offended that none of these complainers knows how to use a dictionary.
“Well, unless you’re an ignorant moron, of course and begging to be outraged”.
This sums it up for a good amount of people….smh
ARCOM’s for everybody who took offense.
That’ll show Big Army it can’t be politically incorrect.
I’m offended that they’re offended.
Can I have one?
You’re double offended, you get two!
Since the complainer states on his twitter page that he’s a USMC Gunnery Sergeant, shouldn’t it be a Navy Commendation Medal?
Navy Accommodation Medal.
“Navy Accommodation Medal.”
*snicker*
Would that include one for last year’s SV Tournament winner as soon as he makes his latest report on TAH to SECDEF?
He and the rest of The Dutch Rudder Gang can eat a bag of raw Swamp Donkey dicks after they KISS MY ASS!!
Cracks? cracks? How racist against the melanin-challenged!
masses? Big people deserve respect!
Begging? Now you are slapping the poor!
gee. This could be considerd kinda fun, in an “imbecile smearing poo” kinda way. I see now why they do it. They became bored smearing actual poo.
Maybe if we buy they a set of finger paints, and some paper, they would stop bothering real people?
Dick Blick Art Supplies has discounts on volume purchases for fingerpaint and other kindergarten art supplies.
Said the warrior, “Dammit! I found another a chink in my armor. And I want to know how the little SOB got in there!”
Defecatory byproduct!
You could have posted a spew alert, AirCav!
This really is a true story, unlike the “nip in the air” explanation. Long ago when I was in school and one of the kids with potential who seemed not to give a shit, I was taught about occidentals and orientals. Never thought anything of it until, many years later with my potential still unrealized and my attitude largely unchanged, I used the term oriental in an office. You could have heard a pin drop and I was quickly informed that “oriental” is taboo and only Asian is to be used. Who knew?
I was in Korea as part of a deployment for cold weather training, while stationed in Okinawa.
I had referred to Koreans as gooks while within the hearing of the company gunny.
The gunny schooled me up on that but not in a hostile manner as would happen today.
How was I supposed to know that gook was Korean for foreigner?
Grimmy,
That story gunny told you was not quite accurate. I learned this from our older Korean Civil Affairs civilian during my time as the Dep. G5 at 2ID.
The Korean word for American is “Miguk.” During the Korean War, Koreans would point to GIs and say “Miguk! Miguk!” [Americans! Americans!]. The GIs thought they were saying “Me gook” [I’m a gook]; so, GIs started calling Koreans “Gooks”.
MIGUK is a character-compound comprising the following two words:
1. Mi. The Chinese character means “beautiful” [it is used in China and Korea for America; in Japan they use “Bei” meaning rice — i.e., rich.
2. Guk. The Chinese character means “country/nation.”
Class dismissed!
Yep, AC. We were apparently ejumicated by similar folks. About 20 years ago a kid thoroughly smacked me down for properly using the word Oriental (as opposed to the word Occidental) in an anthropological context. Until then, I had no idea that I was a racist or that all those people I knew around the world were as well.
All just to say that in my considerable years on the planet I have yet to hear anyone use the word derisively, but we all now know not to use it because apparently there is a potential for someone somewhere to take offense.
Sure wish the PC police or whoever would spend as much time teaching kids how to properly use words as they do teaching them what words not to use.
And that is about as articulate as I can make all this.
Funny story: the word also relates to “disoriented,” as in “to lose one’s sense of direction” or “confused.”
The original meaning of to “orient” oneself related to facing a map right side up to read properly. Back in classical times, they would put east at the top, so one “oriented” the map.
As for the whole gook/nip/zipperhead thing, I offer Denis Leary’s take on the matter.
Wasn’t there a chink in Hillary Clinton’s campaign fundraising operation a few years back?
I’ve worn armor before in the SCA. That was a typical phrase we used to describe weak points that were easily manipulated. Also, one gentleman of Asiatic descent described himself as the only true Chink in an Armor. It was a fun debate that had nothing to do with race.
But, since pResident 0bama has been stirring up this racial crap, I am not surprised.
They should find the Chink in the armor and Nip it in the bud before someone gets Gypped.
So, I take an art appreciation course in college just to learn what I missed in my upbringing. One day, the class is introduced to abstract expressionism. The only thing I remember from that segment of the course is the name Jackson Pollock and for reasons having nothing to do with art: Where syllables are accented actually matters in pronouncing names and other words.
For your enlightenment in regard to Pollock, as opposed to pollock:
Alaska pollock or walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) is a species of the cod family Gadidae. Alaska pollock is a semipelagic schooling fish widely distributed in the North Pacific with largest concentrations found in the eastern Bering Sea.
While related to the common Atlantic pollock species of the same family, the Alaska pollock is not a member of the same Pollachius genus. Rather, recent research suggests that it is more closely related to Atlantic cod, and that Alaska pollock should be moved back to genus Gadus in which it was originally described as Gadus chalcogrammus. Furthermore, Norwegian pollock (Theragra finnmarchica), a rare fish of Norwegian waters, is likely the same species as the Alaska pollock. – source: Wiki
So you have several species of Pollock, the pelagic fish species, and subsequently, the artistic human of the species, who drank between bouts of painting.
Well, now they’ve all gone and done it! Bodaprez and Fatty Kim are now calling each other naaaaasty names.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/n-koreas-kim-slams-rabid-dogs-after-obama-comments/ar-AA8O6fE
Reminds me of the huge controversy over the perfectly legitimate term “niggardly”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%22niggardly%22
I remember that.
Don’t forget Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. His was a “three-fer”: he held that the terms “black hole”, “black sheep”, and “angel food cake” were racist.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/07/11/texas-county-official-sees-race-in-term-black-hole/
Freakin’ moron.
“John Wiley Price”. He’s such an embarrassment to that city, but people keep voting for him.
So, no comment about the niggardly funding given them by the current administration?
So, I googled the word “chink” just for shits and giggles, and the number one result that came up was a recent article about ISIS hostage-taking. Here’s an excerpt:
http://news.yahoo.com/hostage-drama-shows-change-propaganda-technique-204212406.html
What an anti-Asian racist this Veryan Khan must be!
Reminds me of one of my fondest memories of junior high when a girl called me a ‘honky’. She had red hair and freckles and paler skin than I do and unlike her, I actually knew what it meant and laughed my head off.
What are they to say now, “HEY, I’ve got a Gook in my armor!”?
FUCK IT, who isn’t offended these days, SUE ME, and if you get anything, I’ll split it with you (Mighty liberal of me, ain’t it?).
Next they’ll be howling because someone said “slopes” when talking about mountain grades and hillsides!!
Yep. I guess no one can talk about going skiing now for fear of offending people, either.
Racist! I heard you say “Hit the slopes!”
——
Tips up!
I thought I’d heard heard it all for PCness. This one is the ultimate. So far.
As a side note, the Marine PAO whose tweet was quoted in that article needs his CO to sit him down for tea and beatings. And run out of tea.
Likewise the ‘Gunnery Sergeant’ authoriTHAI.
Just glanced at his user picture on Twitter and he seems to be a Major. This means a First Sergeant or Sergeant Major intervention at the very least.
Dumb and dumber. JarHeadPAO actually expects an apology from the Army Times. Really.
https://twitter.com/JarheadPAO/status/560991045484564481?lang=en
From the picture posted on the Twitter account, it looks like he was recently (as in today) awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for being offended.
Spec8 Moerk is undoubtedly fuming and pacing right now.
So now we know that the Twitter-Sphere is the true and final arbiter of all things linguistic. If just one person on Twitter is offended by a single word, regardless of context, that word is no longer available for civilized intercourse.
I’m offended you said intercourse! Of course.
The more I look and think about this, the more I believe it’s an April Fools Day prank two months early.
Look, it’s the middle of winter, cold and snowy outdoors. Nothing to do, the Super Bowl hasn’t been played yet, let’s just do something to get some laughs.
So I’m thinking that those who were “offended” are just stirring the pot a little and laughing at whatever comes to the surface.
Just my thoughts.
Now I’m all hungry for Chinese take out.
[…] Creepy Democrats Escorted Reporters To Bathroom At Philadelphia Retreat This Ain’t Hell: Asians Outraged By Army Headline That Had Nothing To Do With Them Weasel Zippers: UK Muslim Leader Accuses London Mayor Boris Johnson Of Terrorism For Calling […]
Maybe the folks reading the headline thought they were discussing Asian soldiers wearing a new type of body armor and became confused….all those liberal vegans who are missing out on animal protein seem unaware of the damage that lack of protein has on their cognitive functionality.
VOV: one of the folks complaining apparently is a USMC PAO (O4 type) of Chinese descent. Seriously.
You’d think he’d at least be smart enough to look the word up in a dictionary.
He’s also posted an article to his Twitter from two years ago (at Salon) about why we shouldn’t use the term in this day and age. For a Marine officer, he’s pretty thin skinned.