Eliott Dumoulin is a journalist who covers Canada for the French newspaper Le Monde. In this article, he tries to explain to readers back home what’s going on.

  • spirinolas@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Look, I don’t mean to antagonize you but you’re looking at it in a very American-centric (and quasi-chauvinistic) way.

    In other countries the c-word doesn’t have the same connotation as in the US. You are assuming American culture, and its concepts, are universal. They’re not.

    There’s nothing inherently wrong in the c-word and the n-word, but it’s the context where those words got to be used that made them so repugnant. Since the n-word was mostly a US thing, its taboo meaning passed over to all variants of English. The c-word though, was already used in other variants and didn’t have the same bad connotation it does in the US. So it kept being used in a different way.

    Trying to force the American meaning on other English speakers comes at best as ignorant and, at worst, chauvinistic. I don’t think you have bad intentions since you clearly don’t understand how a word can have very different meanings in different cultures. But now you know.