The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

[Keith&Co.]

If the original title was published today regardless of content it would immediately be denounced as racists.

Well, so was the term, "niggardly," used properly in a conversation about budgets.

People just suck.

When did the term niggardly become associated with race? I must have overlooked that memo.

It isn't. It wasn't. A guy used it and people reacted. Medua blew up.
Scholars insisted the word had no racial connotations. People still demanded an apology... for their ignorance, and their willful adherence to that ignorance in the face of dictionaries, linguists, etc.

People really suck.

 

[steve_bank]

If the original title was published today regardless of content it would immediately be denounced as racists.

Well, so was the term, "niggardly," used properly in a conversation about budgets.

People just suck.

amicall fixture used for machining or assembly to hold materials. At a company I was working at we told not to use the word because it could be misinterpreted.

It was a slur used racially, I had an uncle who used the slur 'jig a boo' for blacks. He had a slur for just about everybody.

Missed that text error.

The word for a mechanical fixture is a 'jig'.

 

[Swammerdami]

If the original title was published today regardless of content it would immediately be denounced as racists.

Well, so was the term, "niggardly," used properly in a conversation about budgets.

People just suck.

The Google Ngram Viewer is a fun tool. In 1809, "niggardly" appeared in print almost 6 times as often as "stingy." "Stingy" took the lead in 1970 and is now 4.5 times as common as "niggardly."

 

[Keith&Co.]

amicall fixture used for machining or assembly to hold materials. At a company I was working at we told not to use the word because it could be misinterpreted.

It was a slur used racially, I had an uncle who used the slur 'jig a boo' for blacks. He had a slur for just about everybody.

Missed that text error.

The word for a mechanical fixture is a 'jig'.

Yeah, used to use a jig transit to align a missile aligment system. Never got in trouble for reading the steps of the procedure.
DID get in trouble for calling the pointy bits of the alignment image 'the tits.'
But this was at the start of the Navy's big drive of zero tolerance for sexual harrassment. Wonderfully planned put. My very first sexual harrassment awareness briefing was "don't fuck with the bitches."

I do not miss General Military Training. Not a fucken' bit.

 

[Bomb#20]

‘No niggard are you, Éomer,’ said Aragorn, ‘to give thus to Gondor the fairest thing in your realm!’ - JRR Tolkien

 

[DrZoidberg]

I read the Origin of Species by Mr. Darwin. To be honest I dont understand why the religious people throw fits over what he wrote. Evolution as he describes has been observed in plants and domesticated animals and he cites examples. Nothing to throw a fit over.

The fits about it has to do with when it was published. Following the French Revolution Europe had been unstable for 70 years and it didn't seem like stabilizing for a long time. While Enlightenment values seemed nice, a lot of people were worried that it would lead to endless political instability and chaos. Those on the anti-Evolutionary side weren't against the truth. They thought the truth could be sacrificed in order to create political stability and peace.

Similarly, the American culture wars are more about power politics than musings on the nature of the world.

Things are rarely about what it says on the tin they're about.

 

[steve_bank]

Tre Jewish biblical derived narrative is there are humans a special udder god and then there is everything else.

Man is ordained by god to have dominion. It is probaly why conservatives Christians have such a hard time with environmental issues.

They have the idea that evolution says 'man came from apes and monkeys', which is not really true. It seiously offends the Christian superiority over nature, Utterly repugnan to then.

The literal interpretation of Genesis saysgod created all things as they are. In his time it would be a theological shit storm. Stll is today in many ways.

 

[Gun Nut]

‘No niggard are you, Éomer,’ said Aragorn, ‘to give thus to Gondor the fairest thing in your realm!’ - JRR Tolkien

Indeed, Éomer was not stingy... written in the 1950's

 

[steve_bank]

The Brits had a number of slurs for those African and Indian and other ' inferiors' in the Empire.

Being a British ivory tower academic of his day I would be surprised if Tolkien was not racist.

 

[bilby]

The Brits had a number of slurs for those African and Indian and other ' inferiors' in the Empire.

Being a British ivory tower academic of his day I would be surprised if Tolkien was not racist.

He was famously opposed to the popular racism of the inter-war period, and was particularly scathing in his response to a German publisher who asked him to declare his racial background, in preparation to publish a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938.

https://www.indy100.com/news/jrr-tolkien-hobbit-nazis-antisemitism-b1759878?amp

Making impolite and unwarranted assumptions about people is really not called for, particularly when there's plenty of historical evidence in the public domain that contradicts your ill-informed speculation.

 

[lpetrich]

I read the Origin of Species by Mr. Darwin. To be honest I dont understand why the religious people throw fits over what he wrote. Evolution as he describes has been observed in plants and domesticated animals and he cites examples. Nothing to throw a fit over.

Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay called "Look Long Upon A Monkey", where he addresses that issue. He said in it that all the objections that he ever got to evolution are objections to human evolution. Not to the evolution of anything else. Nobody getting indignant over the evolution of whales from land animals, for instance.

"Origin of Species" avoided the issue of human evolution entirely.

He started his book with a long discussion of domestic pigeons, using them as an example of what can be accomplished with artificial selection.

He noted that species vs. variety (subspecies) was a long-running controversy, and he proposed that there is no clear line between them.

I like his discussion of rudimentary (vestigial) features. CD said that his predecessors often said about them that they are to fill out the "plan of creation" -- for completeness. Thus, baleen-whale fetuses grow teeth that they later resorb, because they would not be complete without those transitory teeth. One has to respect pre-Darwinian biologists much more than recent creationists, because they did not deny vestigiality.