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Usenet Posted 21 years ago
Usage

Bongo, Bwana?

For reasons unknown to me, a post I wrote to this thread, and which I reposted when it did not appear, still has not appeared. Therefore, I am going to limit it to alt.usage.english this time. My apologies to anyone who receives the previous posts along with this one.
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Your use of "redneck" here strikes me as problematic. While some people might connect the term "redneck" with the idea of a person who holds racist beliefs, I don't believe that is usually held to be the case. Jeff Foxworthy, born and raised in the southern US state of Georgia, is a comedian and actor who has built up a whole career based upon a stereotype of rednecks which appears to contain not one iota of racism.

Then there is the use of the term on the American animated television program King of the Hill, created by Mike Judge(1). In that program, Hank Hill's neighbor Kahn Souphanousinphone regularly refers to Hank as a "redneck." It has been made abundantly clear that Hank is no racist, so we would expect him to object to Kahn's use of "redneck" if it did indeed mean, to those characters living in Texas, "racist." Yet Hank has never made that objection. We have to conclude that for Mike Judge, "redneck" does not mean "racist." If Judge had gotten it seriously wrong, I would expect the matter to have started a controversy, but no such controversy has occurred.
Note:
(1) Judge was born in Ecuador, raised in New Mexico, attended college in California, and has lived for at least a decade in Texas.

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com
  
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