I was very surprised at the number of readers who read yesterday’s post on the cultural appropriation of bagels as a serious critique, and taking me to task for not seeing that cultural appropriation was mostly beneficial.
The fact is, the piece was clearly satirical, and if you didn’t know that from the “satire” tag at the bottom, you’d know it if you read the site even semi-regularly. For I’ve long criticized those who cry “cultural appropriation” when people simply adopt aspects of other cultures that they like.
These comments were mostly by newbies, but really, shouldn’t you read a site for a while before you start going after its host (the names I was called are legion)? I’ve let some of those comments through, but have deep-sixed ones that were particularly nasty. The lesson I’ve learned from this is not to presume that commenters know anything about the site. (I already knew that a subset of commenters are simply nasty, and will call people names of they don’t like their posts.)
The rude people won’t be commenting here any more. Those who took the piece seriously but didn’t get nasty about it will, of course, be allowed to keep commenting. I don’t mind disagreement, but I do mind name-calling.
Sub
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It was very well written, so perhaps it’s a compliment that so many were snookered? Eh, perhaps I’m reaching, I don’t know.
You hit the nail on the head. It is the sophisticated satire that confuses people. And that is why PCC(e) does not do super heroes (except for pliny-the-in-between-my favourite super hero!!) but prefers Akira Kurosawa instead.
I knew from the title alone it was satire. That being said I just read through the comments, and my impression is that very didn’t get it, and that many were just playing along, so maybe some of the joke is on people who didn’t recognize that?
*very few didn’t get it
When you just view the page like that you miss the many comments that were evaporated for violating Roolz.
“When you just view the page like that you miss the many comments that were evaporated for violating Roolz.”
Ah, maybe that explains it. I guess there were more “particularly nasty” ones that were “deep-sixed” than I suspected.
Nawww. . only two comments
One of the comments vaporized was itself satire. Ironic.
Though to be fair to newbie commentators, it’s getting increasingly hard to know what is satire.
Take this article in the Telegraph for instance: “Student accused of violating university ‘safe space’ by raising her hand”.
I really thought this was satire, and was looking to see whether the date was 1st April. But I now think that it might actually be for real.
It is one thing for a newbie (or anyone else) to fail to recognize satire. It is something else to respond with hostility and insult the author.
That is pretty startling. It seems there were rules against reacting to debate points (lest anyone feel bad), but this student was being picked on for defending Israels’ right to exist while others were given more free rein. It does seem real.
Some took the bagels seriously??!! Unbelieveable. And we loved it!! Keep it up, Prof Coyne!! And thank you.
I have to say that the post yesterday, and a very good one it was too, was so obviously satirical that I can’t believe anyone took it seriously. Then again, I suppose I’m used to your views on cultural appropriation, so perhaps was able to see the point more quickly than a newcomer to the site.
Perhaps the proximity to April fools day confused some readers. Close enough to mean everything we see must be taken seriously since it isn’t on that special day!
I posted the piece to my personal FB page and was surprised (not really) by a nasty comment from one of my old acquaintances who obviously has a defective satire detector (sigh).
Clearly the bagels post was a deliberate micro-aggression against individuals with Satire Detector Insufficiency Disorder.
Wins the thread!
cr
In the near future this era will be known as when The Onion became indistinguishable from hard news.
Eeeyup.
I hope so! (That is, I hope that this era will be short-lived.) From your mouth into Ceiling Cat’s ears!
I just want to point out that you’re not a sailor, Jerry. (Or a brand of rum.) Therefore you are not entitled to commit cultural appropriation by using phrases such as “miss the boat.” Sailors are a distinct cultural entity and since the time of Noah, millions of sailors have missed the boat and were stranded in port, a tragedy that scars them for life.
heh.heh.heh.heh.
.That. is just precious !
… … especially including, as you did, N o a h, the “What’s a Cubit” – Sailor !
At m’workstation: guffawing out loud !
Blue
C’mon people! Don’t you see that the satirical post is this one…
It might be a tactic like politicians use too – they pretend afterwards they were only joking because of all the people who took them seriously. 🙂
Seriously though, I thought it was obvious that it was a satire, and a very good one! I responded on a tangent though, away from both the satire and cultural appropriation.
The most effective satire is when it is so close to the target that the satirical elements may at first be too subtle for some. This is what made Stephen Colbert’s character so good, but I know some people didn’t “get it”. Similarly, I’ve seen stories from The Onion shared as if they were actual news items. I thought the bagel piece was excellent. It helped me to realize, as a former Catholic, who used to buy bagels from a shop staffed by Orthodox rabbinical students, the complex guilt I felt whenever I was forced to buy culturally appropriated imitations.
It is not just the Onion. There are several other sites that produce satire that many people share and rant and rave. Even when pointing it out to them, some try to justify their rant anyway.
I have seen some stories for which I couldn’t decide if real or satire, so I look at other stories on that site to decide.
I’ve often seen people angry at the mere fact that satire wasn’t tagged as such, as this puts the burden on them to choose whether to laugh or denounce the author. This seems to be too much to expect of those compelled to denounce each and every offense they encounter – i.e., SJWs.
I’d be interested to know the location/nationality of the folk who didn’t spot it was satire.
If our prejudices are correct then most of them should have been USers or Germans.
Certainly if anyone with a .uk address didn’t get it then we’ll have them drummed out of the country.
Oi! I resemble that remark! I am from Germany! I got it in once without even looking at the satire tag!!!!1111!!!1!!!!eleventy!!1!!!!!!
*Saddling my huff and riding into the sunset!* Oh wait, I’m appropiating American culture…
One goes off _in_ a huff, not on it, so a saddle would be malapropos. 😉
On a positive note, one friend of a friend commented that the blog post was an obvious “schmear campaign” aimed at gentiles.
LOL!
Speaking as a Gentile (I think), what am I? Chopped liver?
Heh, that’s what I do… I schmear the cream cheese on my bagel….
In my experience, one of the first things that gets left behind when a person assumes the role of True Believer (TM) is the sense of humor. The negative comments I read fell into two camps. The first group were the TB’s enlightening the rest of us to The Truth, certain that the scales would immediately fall from our poor, deluded eyes. The second group were just common-or-garden-variety internet trolls. On the whole, I see more hope with the trolls, who may grow up someday.
I agree very much with you on that. Exactly what I was already thinking just before I reached your last sentence.
I’m not surprised- anyone ignorant, biased, and shallow enough to think there’s anything valid about “cultural appropriation” is probably not going to thoroughly and objectively read ANY article.
If you have to explain a joke or satire, it kinda takes the fun out of it. It’s unfortunate that some didn’t get the joke. Last night I saw a headline in the Huff Post along the lines of “Poet perfectly explains why it’s wrong to appropriate African American slang.” I wish that was satire, but it’s not. I personally will continue to refer to myself as a hep cat.
It is especially disappointing, to me at least, to see this type of shit coming from someone in the arts (or similar context) in which it is precisely contrary to the basic premises of the context. Namely, to purposely ignore boundaries. This poet should be ashamed.
Loved it, but to their defense, this topic is ruled by Poe’s Law and seemingly, the whole atheist-secular movement went nuts over the last few years. Who would have expected that obviously anti-science, anti-intellectual, regressive attitudes openly hostile to critical thinking would become the defacto mainstream in the US left-liberal-secular circles? Your piece was aber gesund!
anyone who knows a little about the state of climate “science” today
You know the expression “you couldn’t make this stuff up”? JAC did!
I have one thing to say – “Oy vey, pass the gefilte fish!”
I guess some people just don’t get Zionist humor… But seriously… I can’t help but suspect it may in some cases be due a simple failure to even conceive of Jews as being an oppressed minority, whose rights need respect.
I also notice that despite constant protests that “that’s not religion” each time religious people misbehave, this excuse never seems to be heard when it’s about misbehaving Jewish fanatics on the West Bank. Jews are just reflexively placed in a different category these days.
Or when a hyper-religious 46,XY Jew refuses to sit next to a 46,XX fellow passenger in a plane.
So it’s true! Some otherwise intelligent people can’t detect irony or satire.
Well, early in the thread I did write a bit on possible beneficial effects of ‘cultural appropriation,’ but that certainly wasn’t because I didn’t catch that it was satire. I see now that the comments section swelled to several hundred. That usually means arguments.
I was one of those who laughed like crazy. Thank you for such a great post.
I lied – I have another thing to add…!
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF ENGLISH!
I object to the cultural appropriation by non-English people of the English language! How durst thou!
I love how people talk in ‘foreign’ languages interspersed with English words……
I take it you don’t just mean ‘borrowings’ there, like le weekend or le football ?
Cook Islanders do this all the time. (They’re all bilingual). They use their own Rarotongan language but drop into English for a sentence or two without a pause in the flow. They’re very pragmatic about it, they use whichever is most convenient to express what they want to say.
I love how they do that too.
cr
I’ve actually thought that the poor English poured by folks like me into public space may annoy some native English speakers. This is one of the disadvantages when your language is used as lingua franca.
No. Nothing wrong with your English. But even poor English by non-native-English-speakers doesn’t annoy me. It’s not their own language, they’re allowed to be not-very-good it.
(And I totally reject arrogant English speakers who regard poor English by ‘foreigners’ as a sign of mental inferiority. I’ve noticed that such people usually don’t speak a second language themselves and their own standard of English is low).
What does annoy me is native-English-speakers who deliberately mangle the language. (Currently, what really pisses me off bigtime is news reporters who use a compound tense _without_ the auxiliary verb, thus:
“Heavy rain causing flooding throughout the region. Police advising motorists to drive with caution”. I scream sarcastically at the TV “Where the fucking verb in that sentence, you moron?!” )
But anyway, I hope, if I have occasion to try to use my sketchy knowledge of French, that French-speaking people will be charitable and give me credit for at least trying. Seems to me the least I/we can do is extend similar tolerance to non-native-English-speakers. (Gosh, there should be a shorter word for them!).
cr
Not a fan of the gerund then.
I’m not sure it’s actually a gerund they’re using. As I understand it, a gerund is a noun derived from a verb by adding -ing (as in a ‘warning’). I have no objection to that whatever, that’s not what gets my goat.
But ‘Police warning motorists to drive with caution’ isn’t using ‘warning’ as a noun, it’s using it as a compound verb without the auxiliary ‘are’. That’s when I hit the roof.
(One could also identify my example as a subordinate clause not attached to any main clause. Equally offensive a crime).
cr
It would make more sense if it were, “police, warning people to drive carefully, ironically crash squad cars.”
I think that’s how a gerund works but I learned gerunds from Greek and Latin and we were told not to translate like I just wrote. We’d have to say “while” or “after” because that’s the intent of the gerund.
With respect, having googled it, I think you’re using ‘warning’ there as a verb not a gerund. And it’s okay there because it’s in a subordinate clause, the main clause has an active verb ‘crash’.
But I emphasise I’m not any sort of expert on grammar. I usually know instinctively whether something’s grammatical or not, which is maybe why bad grammar grates on me.
cr
Yes you’re right. I thought it was wrong when I was writing it. I’m okay with people leaving off the verb “to be” in English (“Police warning” instead of “Police are warning”) as many other Indo-European languages do the same. The meaning is inferred so why bother saying it?
“The meaning is inferred so why bother saying it?”
Because it’s ungrammatical to leave it out?
More significantly, it then sounds like a subordinate clause, as in your example, leaving the listener waiting for the main clause which is never going to come.
cr
But grammar rules change all the time (in the Middle Ages a double negative was ok and a way to emphasize something). Eliminating the verb “to be” works all over Europe.
“Eliminating the verb “to be” works all over Europe.”
Not in English. It’s there for a reason. Leaving it out changes the meaning.
And not in French either! Try leaving out auxiliaries there! For example, the passé composé, or try leaving ‘aller’ out of the future proche or ‘venir’ out of the passé récent…
cr
Trust me, we are as smart as Italians, Spanish, etc. and can handle a missing “to be”. Using the verb to be to construct the past tense isn’t the same as leaving it off when you’re saying something like “he is big”. It sounds weird in English, but other languages do it all the time and it all started with the Romans.
You’re basically arguing against finite verbs and English uses them a lot.
Hebrew skips “to be”, also. Might that pre-date the Romans?
Yes but European languages got that from the Romans.
Ah! Any chance the Romans got it from the Israelites?
Perhaps more accurate to say Jews than Israelites, at the time of the Roman Empire…
(Oops! I neglected to write out the complete sentence!)
I don’t know related Ancient Hebrew and Latin are but since they are contemporary, they probably didn’t. I do know that Latin is an Indo-European language and Ancient Hebrew is a Semitic language.
Convergent linguistics, then? (Taking off from convergent vs. divergent evolution, and making a joke with it…)
Also consider nominal sentences in English.
I certainly am NOT arguing against finite verbs, I’m complaining about their omission! Every sentence should have one, as the link you cited says.
Nominal sentences – which, as your link notes, are rare – have an implied finite verb. There’s a reason such sentences are rare, which IMO is because they’re not full grammatical sentences. Newspaper headlines and brief comments are permissible exceptions, but this does not extend to ordinary descriptive speech. IMO.
cr
So who made up these grammatical rules? If we didn’t have them, would we really not be able to communicate? If you look into it, these rules were made up by some people back in history (I want to say Victorians) and they’ve long since stopped reflecting how the language is actually used. Saying “it’s bad because it’s against the rules” is just not persuasive. I can buy that you don’t like it but using the language in they way we wish isn’t going to destroy it; it will probably make it better and definitely keep it alive.
P.S. And if you meant to say I’m arguing against non-finite verbs, no, I’m not arguing against them, I’m arguing against the omission of finite verbs. A sentence can have as many non-finite verbs as it likes (or none), but they cannot substitute for a finite verb.
cr
It’s still not a convincing argument to say it’s bad because of some Victorian grammar rules.
No, the Victorians didn’t make the rules. Language arose out of a desire to communicate, as unambiguously as possible, and it has its own subtle rules. Grammarians merely attempt to codify what they are.
You know that if you make one mistake in a computer language the compiler / interpreter just says ‘Syntax error’ because it fails to understand. (Or does something worse). Natural language is far more complex but it has to have mutually understood rules, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to understand this sentence.
I’m learning French. It has its own rules, some similar to English, some quite idiosyncratic. For example, ‘venir de [+ verb]’ means ‘[I] have just [done something]’. Without it, the sense changes completely. No use arguing it might as well be left out because it’s an arbitrary rule.
cr
If you look into who came up with our grammar rules you’ll find what I say is true.
As for French, I’m sure voilà must really grind you since it has no verb.
You think grammarians were a Victorian invention or that they all died out in 1900?
Voila derives from ‘vois la’ – ‘see there’. The verb is implicit. But anyway, it’s French, I’ll let them worry about their own grammar rules. I don’t know enough to criticise.
Nobody’s reading this page anymore, we’d better stop. You can have the last word if you like: ….
cr
No I don’t think grammar emerged with Victorians but I think it was the Victorians that codified what we now have as grammar rules. They’ve never been revisited and even at the time, the language wasn’t used that way. If we force our language to comply with standards written in the last century or so, we 1) won’t succeed because people use the language as they see fit 2) will be treating our language like a dead language
Yes! You’re finally getting it the verb in voila is implicit! Just like the verb is implicit in all the other instances you so despise and in all the other examples of languages that eliminate the verb (usually “to be”) in similar sentences.
I don’t see anything grossly wrong with your newscaster quotation. Information is conveyed tersely. The medium of newscasting is different in style from the medium of careful writing.
Newscasters should at least speak reasonably grammatical English. And I think any complete sentence, in British or ‘Murican, must contain a finite verb. (Thanks Diana for the link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_verb )
Those two sentences I quoted do not; therefore they could only be subordinate clauses to a proper main clause. Which ain’t there.
(Observant readers will have noted that my invective directed at the TV made the same error. That was deliberate ironic sarcasm).
cr
Dr. Coyne, you can keep your Bagels. I got a kick out of your article. What faux outrage that was.
See you Saturday
Extraordinary. Of course it was satire.
I kept thinking this would have been a perfect April Fools joke.
I would have thought imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Lots of indignation to spare these days.
Why white people need to stop saying “Namaste”
http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-culture/why-white-people-need-to-stop-saying-namaste-20160401-gnw2xx.html
… Possibly she wrote it tongue in cheek April fools … or possibly she just has little sense of humour
… and what about them yoga pants?!
So surprised at the number of bagel comments and even more surprised ( shocked would be more appropriate) at some of the content.
One of the really great things about this site is the knowledge that posts are invariably informative,educating, polite, can be very amusing but most of all vitriol is never permitted.
Long may it be so.
I got it. Bravo! on a nice bit of satire!
I thought about replying with a bit of counter-satire about the rest of the world appropriating British Sandwiches.
In the end I decided not to because (as I have commented on another site) reality is so twisted nowadays that you need to put [satire] and [/satire] flags on your comments – which seems to undermine the point of satire in the first place.
Don’t even mention irony.
The satire was obvious, but i thought it a near perfect example of how silly is the whole cultural appropriation issue.
Ha ha! Damn. I was too sick to reply but I read the piece and laughed immediately, knowing it was satire.
Hope you’re feeling better, now, and that you’re perfectly well immediately if not sooner!
Yes I’m better now. I poisoned myself with MSG.
That’ll teach you not to culturally appropriate Chinese food.
It was actually BBQ chips called “The Devil’s BBQ”. How could I resist?
I would encourage you to write more satire, Jerry. There are few things more useful than separating the humorless from everyone else.
As a p.s. I’d also refer to the ‘THE IDEOLOGY IS NOT THE MOVEMENT’ blog at http://slatestarcodex.com .
The blog discusses how ‘tribes’ form and why (for instance) the Bible or the Koran is not as important as the human benefits of being past of a specific ‘tribe’.
So little Mexican hats – or bagels – are not important to someone outside ‘the tribe’ which uses these things as part of a reinforcement of shared tribal identity – ‘the tribe’ see them as ‘appropriation’.
Which could explain why many religious believers are impervious to criticism of the factuality of their sacred texts – unless it is used (tribal colours?) as a rallying call against the out-group. Similarly it could explain why those opposing gun-control are so passionate, or why (some) left wingers are so authoritarian. Or right wingers, or atheists, or anti-vaxxers. And so on.
It is a good thing that not too many residents of Gentilia read the article or we would have had many more nasty comments.
Residents of Genitalia? Louses!
Well I, for one, refuse to accept that the piece was satirical. I want to take a stand against the overuse “cultural appropriation”, but I’m not interested in either dreadlocks or kimonos. But eating bagels? That’s right up my alley!
(Any Germans out there want to complain about the cultural appropriation of beer?)
Germans!? You mean Sumerians!
Now if all you americans would stop appropriating my native language, english, we could have a meaningful polylogue about this.
Good point. Is it cultural appropriation to learn a foreign language?
Absolument! sans question!
The moment I saw the post title, I laughed 🙂 Clearly satirical!
When you can no longer tell what is satire and what is a “legitimate” complaint, that should tell you that the whole phenomenon is ridiculous.
Ah nuts, wrong thread.
I enjoyed the humor also, but came close to remarking semi-seriously about the idiocy of
complaining about “cultural appropriation”. There is no culture I can think of that hasn’t “appropriated” from other cultures. And, usually, they were improved thereby. Many of the accomplishments the Romans were noted for were “appropriated” from the Etruscans. Mongols “appropriated” everywhere they went. The more diversity, the more “cultural appropriation” by the governing group, the
more easily it interacted with those they governed. For example, the Mongols in China took on Chinese dress and culture when among the Chinese, but reserved space in the Forbidden City to secretly continue their Mongolian heritage. One would hope that knowledge, appreciation and incorporation of the elements of other cultures would, over time, meld the “tribes” more closely into one “tribe”. Humanity as one tribe.
On the other hand, as long as we’re focusing on dreadlocks, tattoos, kidnapped religious language and texts, bagels, etc., it may be better to fight over such trivia than to escalate to genocide and/or war. Maybe we should nitpick about “cultural appropriation” more if it, in any way, prevents more violence.
Darn! I almost posted a comment about the post being three days late, but so many people were taking it seriously that I began to doubt myself and decided to stay out of it.
It is no fun not to be able to call people names you retired, cat loving, intelligent person you!
And don’t forget boot-wearing, either!
Don’t get me started on Italian food…..
People took that seriously?! Seriously?!! There is no hope for humanity.
I realized immediately it was very clever satire.
Still, I’m tempted to claim that since I acquired my taste for bagels while attending a public high school that was 75% Jewish (900 out of 1200 students), I’m off the hook.
The satire made the bagel ‘taste’ better but I dislike cream cheese so I didn’t bite.
There is no way, save starvation, would I have swallowed that.. meanwhile, in the words of Ian Dury and the Blockheads a band I really like:
There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
Probably got help from their mum
(who had help from her mum).
There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
Now that we’ve had some,
let’s hope that there’s lots more to come.
Newbie thought I am, I did read the piece as satire, and enjoyed it. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I involuntarily cringe just a little bit whenever I see bagel sandwiches on a menu that contain sausage or bacon. Worse, when some philistine actually bakes the sausage or bacon *into* the bagel. >:(
Of course it was satire, everyone knows the best bagels are from Montréal.
I have a gentleperson here in the foyer of my time machine. It is from Blombos Cave, South Africa. (Since it is unlikely I could produce fertile offspring with this hominid, I use the neuter gender.) It is annoyed at this cultural appropriation of “culture”. It’s grandmother’s tit-blusher was celebrated over a decade ago in Henshilwood’s paper from Blombos, and it feels that it has cultural history that everyone depends on.
I think it is highly speciesist of you to use neuter gender just because you (presumably) could not interbreed with the hominid in question.
I feel it is highly animalist to focus on living entities. This discriminates quite unfairly against inanimate entities such as, for example, rocks.
cr
Rocks won’t worry themselves about little things like discrimination.
Well, you should know, you serial-rock-abuser, you.
cr
😉
Wow…. I had NO idea!
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15257259
I was actually thinking of Henshilwood’s 2002 ochre … artefact, not the other 2011 pigments. But the coincidence of a very very old artefact and it being ochre, of all things … was always suggestive.
You were surprised that people didn’t recognize satire. Really? I posted the following advise to usenet in 1983.
“Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks.
Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that “I’m only kidding”. If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously”
Whoops. “advise” -> “advice”. And I won’t blame any auto correctiion.