Hottentots - have you ever heard of this word?

As it happens I have.

I remember reading about them when I was a kid, I certainly recall it from King Solomon Mines, and no doubt from the comics or Biggles books back then.

I just thought (and still did until today) they were a tribe in Africa, like the Zulu or Bedouin.

Why do I mention this, well the 1964 film Mary Poppins, has just be reclassified to Parental Guidance because the term was (innocently) used twice in it!



In all honesty I can see things from both sides - how stupidly ridiculous and woke-ish it is going in one direction and how autocratic and Big Brother-ish it is going in the other - both at ever increasing speed.

The world is going bonkers.

It's not going to end well.

Mary Poppins film age rating raised over 'discriminatory language'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68402362

Fwiw I found this clip of one of the uses of the word - remember this was filmed way back in 1964.

Ok things change but wouldn't you think the major concern in our day and age would be a crazy old man firing a cannon at people rather than simply saying the word 'hottentots'???

I was a huge fan of Rider Haggard, and his King Solomon's Mines was a big favourite of mine, so, like Sluffy, I probably first came across the word there.
It's like a lot of words now, not used in polite company, but I think we're taking it a little too far now.
Most people are educated enough to understand that things were different back in the day. 
So many words were in common usage that are unthinkable now, and not just with regard to race.
Idiot, Mongol, two words commonly heard when I was a kid are unthinkable now.
We just need to stop being so terrified of hearing these words coming at us from the past. I can't tell you how many trigger warnings I've heard on Talking Pictures TV, before they play a movie.
Yes, the movie WAS made in less enlightened times, but I can handle it. We're not stupid.
Even Nuts has changed the word I typed at the beginning of line five to 'idiot'.
Holy moly.

The words mong and spastics had been censored to idiot because we once had a poster who would not stop using them after being politely asked not to do so.

I've uncensored the words now because I don't believe anyone will use them on here anymore.

Hopefully not anyway.

As for the reference in the film I don't even believe it was intended as a slur - just common usage back then.

Are they now going to censor Dad's Army because of Jones' use of the word fuzzy-wuzzys???

They'll be banning To Kill A Mockingbird next. And most John Wayne films.

Can you imagine John Wayne shouting 'Native Americans! Form the wagons into a circle'.

Sluffy wrote:As it happens I have.

I remember reading about them when I was a kid, I certainly recall it from King Solomon Mines, and no doubt from the comics or Biggles books back then.

I just thought (and still did until today) they were a tribe in Africa, like the Zulu or Bedouin.

Why do I mention this, well the 1964 film Mary Poppins, has just be reclassified to Parental Guidance because the term was (innocently) used twice in it!



In all honesty I can see things from both sides - how stupidly ridiculous and woke-ish it is going in one direction and how autocratic and Big Brother-ish it is going in the other - both at ever increasing speed.

The world is going bonkers.

It's not going to end well.

Mary Poppins film age rating raised over 'discriminatory language'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68402362

I totally agree with you Sluffy.

Will common sense ever come back in fashion?

I'm so glad I was born in 1948 and had lovely childhood and teenage years.

I feel sorry for parents today trying to bring children up in this crazy world.

I feel sorry for the children too who have become controlled by their mobile phones.

Today I read an article about primary school children as young as five in Aberdeen
who were asked what they thought about gender neutral toilets and if they would be helpful for trans pupils.

Has anyone ever used a gender neutral toilet?

I have!

Now before you start taking the piss, I was at a council offices some months back, in the evening and the meeting I was attending had run past normal office hours and the women cleaners were already cleaning the gents.

I needed to go and had a choice of the disabled or gender neutral.

Now I could have taken my chances but it would have been a bit unfair if I happened to make a disabled person wait, so, not being afraid of my masculinity, thought I would use the non gender one.

To be honest it was more or less like a disable toilet - when my daughter was to young to go to the ladies by herself and to old for me to take her for a wee in the gents, I had to use them, there was nowhere else for her to go.

It's just ridiculous how PC and woke things have got - so I fully understand a kickback against it - Lee Anderson left the Labour Party as a councillor in protest of Labour supporting the taking of the knee, for instance (he certainly didn't mind Labours anti-Semitism though!!!) - but the right wing kickback is too extreme - it basically seeks to abolish any social conscious in any shape or form - to basically do away with all protection of the weak.

The world is going to pot when they have to censor a Mary Poppins film for saying hottentots (wokeism) yet thing nothing wrong of some loon in the film shooting at them with a cannon (right wing extremism)!!!

I would think attempted mass murder a bigger crime than the use of a racist slur - wouldn't you?