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Posted on 08/14/2026 1:58:13 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word “Chinamen.” She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, “Chinaman” is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur.
In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even “Yes” can mean “No,” when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.
Sure, “Chinaman,” given a certain intonation, can be spoken in a deliberately demeaning way – rather as I learned as a youngster in Scotland to use “Sassenach” to refer to the English. Strictly, it just means “Saxon” in the Gaelic and when non-Anglophobic Gaelic-speakers want to refer to the people south of the border, that’s the word they use. But out of an English-speaking Scotsman’s mouth, you can be sure that’s not all it means. Uttered with a certain, semi-spitting vigor, it also means “snobbish, morally degenerate wankers.”
So, yes, I accept that “Chinaman” can be used as a slur and that it has been. But there’s nothing necessarily or intrinsically slurry about it. It’s the verbal equivalent of “Frenchman,” “Dutchman” and “Irishman.” Indeed, in the sentence to which my editor took exception, “Chinamen” appears nine words after “Englishmen.”
So, who declares it generally verboten? According to my editor, nothing less than the Oxford English Dictionary. But then I checked. Although the OED does say, “Frequently disparaging or derogatory (see also John Chinaman n. Johnny Chinaman n.),” it also lists four possible meanings, the first of which is the entirely innocent, “A man who is Chinese by descent, birth, or naturalization.”
Wikipedia, of course, is less nuanced. It simply announces that “Chinaman is an offensive term.” But it also tells us, indicatively, that its usage is “strongly discouraged by Asian-American organizations.”
What that indicates is that the original energy for the policing of language is generated by certain ethnic minority groups in the US. I suspect this is true in general: that the movement for linguistic censorship springs from America, perhaps from certain groups of members of ethnic minorities, often from “decolonizing” academics who presume to represent them.
These are the kinds of people trying to busybody us into abandoning the word “slave” for “enslaved person,” on the entirely spurious ground that the former necessarily dehumanizes, implying that someone is a slave by nature. That this is nonsense we can easily see by observing that, in English, if we want to refer to the idea that someone is a natural slave, we have to qualify “slave” by putting the word “natural” in front of it. No, “slave” is not intrinsically racist.
Frankly, my contextual view of verbal meaning extends even to the n-word. Lest there be any doubt, I object strongly to the racist use of that word to disparage people with non-white skin. Nonetheless, I was appalled years ago, when I read of a woman high up in some British organization – a nursing one, I think – being fired for referring explicitly to the original title of an Agatha Christie novel that contained the word. And I’ve heard of similar cases since. That people should be so punished is stupidly unjust, since using the n-word to refer to what someone else has written in no way endorses the racist disdain usually attached to it.
I say “usually,” because, according to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction, and the excellent 2002 TV series The Wire, African Americans often use the n-word to refer to each other – but in an ironic, not a racist, manner. So, I think it plausible that a white person could use it in jest when speaking to a very close black friend, without racist contempt being either expressed or perceived. Tarantino thought so, too.
I don’t say all this because I’m keen to revive use of the word. Trust me, I’m not. I say it only because people are being unfairly penalized through a combination of malice, thoughtlessness and fear.
Some members of historically “victimized” groups are eager to exploit the power that membership confers. They’re on the lookout for opportunities to work themselves into a lather of being “offended” and daring others to call them out on it.
But the others don’t dare. Terrified of being called “racist,” they can’t afford the luxury of thought. Instead, jettisoning their critical faculties, they defer to the “offended” party and prove their “anti-racist” identity by punishing the alleged offender. It’s a disgusting dynamic, in which the malicious triumph and the innocent suffer through the cowardly thoughtlessness of those in authority. And the result? The bullies strut around while everyone else walks on eggshells. Fear dominates the field.
All that was at the back of my mind when I chose to make a fuss about my use of “Chinamen.” In the end, my editor was overruled by her boss, who, with some reservations, said I was free to go ahead and use the word if I wanted to. On reflection, however, I satisfied myself that a mellifluent alternative was available. That, together with uneasiness at the thought of making myself look even more cantankerous than usual, by going to war over a word, made me decide to drop the controversial noun.
Rod would have been bolder, of course, and more bloody-minded. And he might have been right. For I’m aware that this is how the authoritarian ideologues carry the day. Someone says something they don’t like. They kick up a fuss, defaming the offender. Conflict-averse onlookers, disturbed out of their quiet lives, view the person upsetting the offended as “contentious” and “divisive.” So, unwilling to suffer further opprobrium, the offender backs down and shuts up. Tongues are tied and the air is chilled. And the illiberal bastards win.
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He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance.
Everything is racist until proven otherwise.........
Power is what power does.
Anyone who gets to decide what is “racist” and make it stick has real power.
We don’t get to speak truth to power—without getting called “racist”.
If the speaker is white, it’s most definitely racist.
I do. Will there be any other questions?
I guess using the word chink was completely off the table.
Theres not one high school senior in fifty who, without looking them up, could correctly define “discrimination” or “prejudice”.
But white man is OK.
Bullshit.
There is a school of thought that says the First Amendment should either be narrowly defined as CONGRESS cannot limit free speech, or else more broadly defined as NO ONE can ever criticize your speech at all. But we’re stuck in the middle where pretty much anyone can come along and say “You can’t say that”.
don’t see why. No one ever heard of the term ‘chink in the armor’? No, it’s not the little guy from China but “used to refer to a weak spot in a figurative suit of armor.”.
You are being niggardly.
American
Chinamen
Sounds fine
Maybe, but the author is just one of the Biggars with thin skin.
The author’s name is Nigel Biggar. Is he being biggardly? ;)
The DemonRAT Party, the SPLC, The dark, Lesbian side of the WNBA and the NBA.
Englishman, Scotsman, Frenchman….
So what’s wrong with Chinaman?
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”
― George Orwell, 1984
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