http://cherrypep.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] cherrypep.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] dreamer_easy 2005-06-18 11:50 am (UTC)

Er, I guess you may flog whichever you like - but me, I'm outta it. :)

And I agree that these are words people use to describe themselves and those analogies aren't, directly, although I do wonder if, the Bell curve book aside, the black athlete stereotype is uniformly rejected. I suspect there's a lot of literature out there about this, and I don't want to get into that discussion - deep waters, too personally ignorant to comment, and no wish to drown.

I admit that in choosing them I was trying to avoid the issue of gender in favour of clarity. I imagine comparisons on the subject of nationality aren't terribly likely to get a great deal of repurposing, principally due to the fact that we don't speak the same language, although some national-stereotypes do get quite a bit of overuse (words starting with 'French', anyone?). But I think one can think of similar examples that get the same sort of twist, like the n-word-that-ends-in-er, has-two-g's and-an-i and is very rude for outsiders to use, PC, intellectual, working-class, gentleman, lady, Parisien, Anglo-Saxon, snob, various terms implying 'immigrant', various terms implying 'not immigrant', socialist, geek, Valley Girl or chav.

People prefer to exist within a group or social category, crap or not. I reckon it's called self-stereotyping or validation or informational influence or something. You'd have to ask someone who knows about social psychology, which I don't.

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