May i ask a question?

It may not have been noticed/reported straight away.

I apologise Movedalot if I misunderstood your post.

DH has travelled all over India and the term is used all the time.
Geordie comes from George Stephenson and his safety lamp "Geordie lamp" used in coal mines

But don't the Indians dislike the Pakistanis so wouldn't it make sense there to use such a term in the same way as we had derogatory names for the Germans in WWII or the French in the Napoleonic Wars.

Surely it's not the same as using it here.

I despair!

The word 'Paki' has been considered an offensive racist term for at least the past 30 years.

For those that don't know that - where have you been?

Of course it has been offensive for a long time. It may be used in all kinds of ways by all kinds of people but nevertheless phrases like "pakis go home" have been stock in trade of the out and out racist brigade for decades, hence the sensitivity around the word.
Anyone who drops it into a thread on a public forum is being either insensitive or provocative. I won't buy "naive" as an option.

Message deleted by Gransnet for breaking our forum guidelines. Replies may also be deleted.

It's a minefield and I think it's best to never use slang nationalistic/ethnic expression. While one say, Irish person would be proud to be thought of as Paddy the next may find it offensive. In South Africa there are Whites, Blacks and Coloureds and during apartheid thre was apparently an official colour chart to decide which category a person was. This could divide families. How silly was that!

Riverwalk. I agree with you. Where have these people been? A friend of mine who is in her 60s has just been hauled over the coals at work for using an old fashioned expression to describe gay people. She was shocked. I thought the same 'where have you been exactly?'

Ana, it would be an insult because it would be a denial of what is true would it not? Surely a person with black or very dark skin is just that, little point and rather silly to proclaim ' I am white if one is not white, just as silly as proclaiming i am black if one has white skin, so different is one is speaking of one's nationality, a friend of mine had a father who was white and from Holland, his mother was black and born in the UK, he is black because his skin is not white, he is British because he was born in the UK, it!s not a case of choice , one is the colour of the skin one is born with

Nfk - I'm sorry but I really don't think silly is an appropriate word to use about this evil system - which was supported by large swathes of the Conservative party, the British establishment and Thatcher

Thanks harrigran for explaining the origin of Geordie. I have learnt something tonight.

Anniebach...I refer you back to my post about my friend's grandson. His skin is white, his eyes are blue and his hair is ginger. His mother is mixed race and his father is white. If you saw him and didn't know his heritage you would say he was white but a South African friend reliably informs me that under the old apartheid system he would have been coloured even though he's whiter than most white people.

At some point in his life his parents will have to decide as they will have to fill out one of those 'ethnicity' questionnaires. Technically I suppose he's mixed race but this is the problem with thinking in terms of race or country to describe someone. Why does he have to be labelled in terms of race? Why can't he just be a little boy?

Just to muddy the waters even further, his grandfather was born in Zimbabwe but his family moved to Jamaica when he was 2 years old and then to England when he was 4 years old. Does that make him Zimbabwean, Jamaican or, as his education and memories are all from here, English?

Thank you, Vampirequeen - I would have taken issue with Anniebach's post myself but didn't want to give anyone yet another reason to have a go at me!

Ask any Asian whether he or she finds the term "Paki" offensive and I think you'll find that they do, and by now most non-Asian people should be aware that the term is not a respectful one.

If, as Harrigran suggested, in India Hindus use it to describe Muslims, that makes it no less offensive. Such Indians might be surprised to find that in the eyes of UK racists they too are "Pakis".

Absent - I have now googled nitty gritty, you're right. I believed what I'd been told by a colleague of West Indian, therefore slave, origins. He was a lovely guy, and must have believed it himself or wouldn't have passed it on.

Overt racism had been part of his life. We worked an area that had been entirely white, until the arrival of the Pakistani community who came to work in the mills. On one occasion he was pinned against the wall, by a very angry man who was screaming racist abuse in his face. When we 'de-briefed' he said his major fear at the time was that he'd lose his temper, and retaliate physically. He said this had got him into trouble when he was at school, so he'd learned to control his temper.

Iasm64 What a horrible experience for your colleague.

All sorts of strange ideas about the origins and meanings of things float about in the ethernet. Just because it is something one can access on one's computer doesn't make it true. When I was doing some home tutoring, I insisted that my students checked and correlated at least three sources, whether internet or books, before they used the information they had found.

pen, just wanted to say how useful I found your post of 18:46 yesterday.

Yes that, good points - no waffle, but what matters in Pen's post

Vampirequeen, I dislike people being labelled , for me I think nationality is all that is required on those forms. My point on black or white is rather like me choosing to say I am right handed because I do use my right hand but I am so left handed it would be rather silly, and why would I choose to, and the same for anyone who is very dark skinned, why would they want to deny they have dark skin and say I am white,

SA during apartheid was a different thing , it meant where you could walk, live, work, who you married, which school you could attended . It was evil, all racism is evil no matter the country

'Bluebell I know apartheid was exceedingly evil. The silly refered to judging people by a colour chart. The fact that grown people (in this case 'White' men - mostly men) could possibly think that a mixed race child who just happened to have paler skin than his parents could be thought white while they were black and therefore inferior is silly / ridiculous / pathetic / stupid etc. The decision to separate people and treat them differently purely on this basis - there are no words for that.

I don't think anyone is saying you can't describe yourself as black, white or pink with green spots if that's what you want to do but there a certain words that are simply not acceptable. No one would thing it was ok to use the N word. So why is it OK to call Pakistanis by the generally accepted insulting shortened version.

Apparently, a very large proportion of Americans who pride themselves on being white have negro blood in them, as the result of slave owners making their slaves pregnant. And there have been examples of black children being born to couples who appear to be white, and vice versa.
The apartheid rules were not just cruel, they were plain daft.

Vampirequeen, I have an awful feeling you and I are speaking of two different things, I was just saying skin colour isn't important and should never be regarded as such . I didn't read the thread which was deleted but realise what name was used, it is in no way acceptable , it offends, insults and hurts

weren't the miners safety lamps invented by Humphrey Davie? Or even Davy.?