(09-09-2016 02:39 PM)MplsBison Wrote:  "Hey whatever happened to that racist nickname that the school was using??" "It wasn't racist because a nickname isn't a fact."

When in doubt, literally just make something up. It doesn't matter if it's gibberish, just make sure you fire back something.

This just in....

Ole Miss offers Master's Degrees.

Now Im pissed.


Im outa this thread. OM can kiss my arse. I gotta go slave a hard drive.


Idiots

PC Society sucks, we have change anything that might offend a few loud and angry usually--but not always--ignorant people. Wake up to real life, not everyone is gonna like everything, everyone and people are gonna have their own tastes and preferences. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, I guess we have change the name of the state, city and Missouri's capital. The Bible has references to murder, incest, polygamy and other sins I guess we should throw it out and encourage people not to take the good in with the bad. Georgia Tech Swag tells awful jokes in some of the threads he starts, I guess we ought to ban him from posting on his own system.

(09-09-2016 06:13 AM)shere khan Wrote:  

(09-09-2016 12:20 AM)Gitanole Wrote:  

(09-08-2016 09:54 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  According to the Wikipedia machine, the name dates from 1897, in a yearbook naming entry [....] Given... the class of people that would have been going to Ole Miss at the previous turn of the century during the long racist Jim Crow era, the idea that it is a pun on Ol' Missus is certainly not far fetched.

And the notion that it has to hearken back to the pre-Civil War period to have racist overtones is silly. It's not as if there weren't any more "Ole Missus" in Mississippi in 1897 just because it was black sharecroppers talking about her rather than slaves.

I'm sure the University of Mississippi students of 1897 hit upon the idea of alluding to their school as 'Ole Miss' the same way students in medieval Europe hit upon the idea of alluding to theirs as 'Alma Mater'. You start by personifying your school as a lady, a mother figure, then adapt a term from your culture to craft some endearment.

For medieval students--whose courses were taught in Latin and whose schools were connected with cathedrals--'alma mater (our mother)' came easily. It caught feelings of affection, whimsy, and respect all at once. For (white) college students in Mississippi--walking among columned buildings on a campus where every professor fought for the Confederacy, while the attitudes and structures of antebellum life were still evident everywhere in the world outside--how do you avoid playing on plantation terms?

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According to the article in Inside Higher Ed, the scholars who served as consultants to the University of Mississippi agree, in the main, that the nickname 'Ole Miss' doesn't raise a lot of hackles these days. As long as the nickname continues to carry benign meanings for people of all ethnicities and enjoy wide acceptance, they didn't recommend its abandonment.

They did suggest that the short form 'UMiss' could do more of the formal and official work for the school to help convey the image of a modern, international, forward-looking institution. 'Ole Miss' can come off as a bit backward in that setting (and certainly nothing in its origin helps to offset that). So there's interest in retaining it more as an athletic thing as the school moves on.

I hate ole miss football worse than anyone on the forum. The whole notion that "ole miss" is a contrived racial pejorative is patently idiotic.

Yes, if that was the claim, it would be patently idiotic.

That is the only reason I can see for presuming that the claim is that Ole Miss is a contrived racial perjorative.

The critique would rather be that it is part of the whitewashing of the pre- and particular post-Civil War racist institution of the plantation.

Quote: If it offends you go huddle in a safe space and commiserate with other idiots over how you are victimized by words. This is gonna happen from time to time, better learn to cope.

As the report notes, any black student at Ole Miss would have been called the n-word multiple times in their studies, predominantly by the Ole Miss frat pack, beside which the racist overtones of Ole Miss is quite secondary.

Its been a while since I've worked at a large US University ... isn't this "safe spaces" just a hyped up Fox News type thing to whine about not feeling free to sling around racist epithets?

Quote: The greatest irony of this little lecture in moral semantics is that it comes from a fan of a school that uses a costumed caricature of a Native American as its mascot. Oh yes spare me the lecture on how the nickname honors a tribe. The only thing it honors is a public relations campaign that sanitized its imagery way ahead of the political correctness learning curve.

Though, I'm only a fan of my alma mater's hockey team, and they dropped the caricature of a Native America, and went for a red-headed bird brain instead.

(09-09-2016 06:13 AM)shere khan Wrote:  The only thing it honors is a public relations campaign that sanitized its imagery way ahead of the political correctness learning curve.

'Way ahead of the learning curve' is your idea of a putdown?

For a school?

May you live a thousand years, my forum friend. Sounds like you'll need every day of them.