The Moire
Please do not interpret the following in any way racist. I am trying to search language and its development. My interest is linguistic, not politics.
We have all heard the 'N' word to describe black people, which in some parts of the world is highly aggravational. I have heard some people say that only black people can use this word without it being offensive. It is a word that used to be harmless, originally it was harmless. There are several stories about how it has changed over the past few generations and I am not an expert on that. Apparently when slave owners started using the language of the slaves to describe the slaves, it became a dirty word and then the slaves started using it as a dirty word. Because of the taboo around using this word, it is difficult to know if that is accurate. It is likely that there are other levels of meaning for the word used by different groups. The media has had a big effect on what people think it means and how it is used.
Nobody has heard of the O word. Most you will assume that I am talking about oral pleasure. I am not. I am talking about another West African word which is a direct parallel to the N word. Ofay. Ofay is a word used by black skinned people to describe white skinned people.
Blonde is a word used to describe pale haired people while Brunette is a word to describe darker haired people. Neither of these are in any way insulting, they are descriptive, nothing more. My intention for using the words nigger and ofay are with the same purpose; descriptive, nothing more.
Ofay also spelled O'Fe, means 'white skinned'. According to the Urban dictionary it has been replaced by use of the terminology 'white devil' which indicates either that Ofay means the same as white devil, or that the people using these words changed their attitude toward white skinned people and therefore changed the word used to describe them. It is possible that this is also what happened with the N word.
It is apparent that in the past two hundred years, these words are a those of the language of racial tension that has come along with racial integration. We know the history that a minority of people made slaves of and decimated the cultures of other groups of people. We are trying to create a different social environment now and for the future which is based on equality and not prejudice.
From a historic point of view in observing social and cultural development, these are important words.
I discovered about the word O'Fe because I was researching Celtic / Irish terminology relating to the Fae, a word which means the Fayries, Elves, the quick-spirits; they do have a lot of names, their mutable nature as creatures of light. This was a side-line from my research into basic etymology, I am exploring the relationship between the word Male and Female, why the prefix Fe has been applied to the term Male ? Fe is the younger Futhark rune from nw European travelers, meaning ‘portable wealth’. It indicates ‘the exchange’ or ‘the transition’ of energy/goods to/from one form and another. Compare; Trae and Rae, Traders and Raiders (tree-workers and reed-lurkers).
The conclusion is that the darker skinned people looked at the lighter skinned people and used a word to describe them which was accurate to their world-view at the time, within the limitations of the language base and thereby assigning to them some quality of association with the appropriate terminology.
The O'Fe of west Africa and the Fae of Ireland both have connectivity. These are words from an older time, where sea-faring people who were not always warring and enslaving one another, ergo were trading with one another, which we certainly know people at that time were doing because the folk-legends and mythologies are full of stories about it; often describing mysterious foreigners with highly exaggerated poetic description.
Such a time as to our generation, befits the modern mythologies of a time before it all went bad for a few centuries, a time from before we began recording history and therefore the victorious conquerers re-wrote the real events to fit their own version, in which of course they portrayed themselves as the good guys. Those books are what we call the histories, where the human tradition of oral storytelling with all of its mythologizing is regarded as hearsay compared with what was written down on paper as an academic account. Neither is superior, they both have their place in our multi-culture as it fast becomes a monoculture.
Some of those books, stored for posterity in warehouses, somewhere in the world, are worth reading; if one can learn to translate them into modern interpretable words complete with notes on original meaning where words have changed their meanings. Such Preface and Appendixes are necessary as a part of the movement we will see occur in the 21st century as more and more old world information is made available through it being entered into the global communication database, the internet. It is a lot of information to assimilate and it will undermine the version of history that most of us were academically educated into believing. It will also provide a wealth of inspiration for the future generations.
For future generations where personal re-creation is available as never before possible, because of technology and what it makes available to us, this quintessentially human defining purpose has become internalized, lest it be lost as we we cease to be the dreaming of our ancestors. We become the dreaming of ourselves.
Please do not interpret the following in any way racist. I am trying to search language and its development. My interest is linguistic, not politics.
We have all heard the 'N' word to describe black people, which in some parts of the world is highly aggravational. I have heard some people say that only black people can use this word without it being offensive. It is a word that used to be harmless, originally it was harmless. There are several stories about how it has changed over the past few generations and I am not an expert on that. Apparently when slave owners started using the language of the slaves to describe the slaves, it became a dirty word and then the slaves started using it as a dirty word. Because of the taboo around using this word, it is difficult to know if that is accurate. It is likely that there are other levels of meaning for the word used by different groups. The media has had a big effect on what people think it means and how it is used.
Nobody has heard of the O word. Most you will assume that I am talking about oral pleasure. I am not. I am talking about another West African word which is a direct parallel to the N word. Ofay. Ofay is a word used by black skinned people to describe white skinned people.
Blonde is a word used to describe pale haired people while Brunette is a word to describe darker haired people. Neither of these are in any way insulting, they are descriptive, nothing more. My intention for using the words nigger and ofay are with the same purpose; descriptive, nothing more.
Ofay also spelled O'Fe, means 'white skinned'. According to the Urban dictionary it has been replaced by use of the terminology 'white devil' which indicates either that Ofay means the same as white devil, or that the people using these words changed their attitude toward white skinned people and therefore changed the word used to describe them. It is possible that this is also what happened with the N word.
It is apparent that in the past two hundred years, these words are a those of the language of racial tension that has come along with racial integration. We know the history that a minority of people made slaves of and decimated the cultures of other groups of people. We are trying to create a different social environment now and for the future which is based on equality and not prejudice.
From a historic point of view in observing social and cultural development, these are important words.
I discovered about the word O'Fe because I was researching Celtic / Irish terminology relating to the Fae, a word which means the Fayries, Elves, the quick-spirits; they do have a lot of names, their mutable nature as creatures of light. This was a side-line from my research into basic etymology, I am exploring the relationship between the word Male and Female, why the prefix Fe has been applied to the term Male ? Fe is the younger Futhark rune from nw European travelers, meaning ‘portable wealth’. It indicates ‘the exchange’ or ‘the transition’ of energy/goods to/from one form and another. Compare; Trae and Rae, Traders and Raiders (tree-workers and reed-lurkers).
The conclusion is that the darker skinned people looked at the lighter skinned people and used a word to describe them which was accurate to their world-view at the time, within the limitations of the language base and thereby assigning to them some quality of association with the appropriate terminology.
The O'Fe of west Africa and the Fae of Ireland both have connectivity. These are words from an older time, where sea-faring people who were not always warring and enslaving one another, ergo were trading with one another, which we certainly know people at that time were doing because the folk-legends and mythologies are full of stories about it; often describing mysterious foreigners with highly exaggerated poetic description.
Such a time as to our generation, befits the modern mythologies of a time before it all went bad for a few centuries, a time from before we began recording history and therefore the victorious conquerers re-wrote the real events to fit their own version, in which of course they portrayed themselves as the good guys. Those books are what we call the histories, where the human tradition of oral storytelling with all of its mythologizing is regarded as hearsay compared with what was written down on paper as an academic account. Neither is superior, they both have their place in our multi-culture as it fast becomes a monoculture.
Some of those books, stored for posterity in warehouses, somewhere in the world, are worth reading; if one can learn to translate them into modern interpretable words complete with notes on original meaning where words have changed their meanings. Such Preface and Appendixes are necessary as a part of the movement we will see occur in the 21st century as more and more old world information is made available through it being entered into the global communication database, the internet. It is a lot of information to assimilate and it will undermine the version of history that most of us were academically educated into believing. It will also provide a wealth of inspiration for the future generations.
For future generations where personal re-creation is available as never before possible, because of technology and what it makes available to us, this quintessentially human defining purpose has become internalized, lest it be lost as we we cease to be the dreaming of our ancestors. We become the dreaming of ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment