Holy mother of God *is horrified*

[elspethdixon]

Oh my God, every time I wincingly look back at the ongoing Cultural Appropriation bitchfight of doom, it gets worse. I'm not otherwise going to get involved, but here, I just couldn't help myself.

So, for those, like me, who hadn't seen or heard about Teresa Hayden's post wherein she expresses her anger over people badmouthing her husband (at least, that's what I assume she was doing from the descriptions - I haven't read any of the stuff involving him, either, but apparently he said things that offended people, refused to appologize when called on it, and then deleted his journal because people were yelling at him): Holy fuck, she calls fans of color and those who support them nithings.

In terms of offensiveness, as a former student of old English? Fuck, people, that's, well, not as horrible as the other n-word (which, please God, I hope no one's actually said), but it's pretty god-awful. Like, enough that I was reduced to staring at my computer screen in horror.

She has basically stated that all the people who disagree with her husband (including but not limited to, fans of color) are hateful, malicious, deformed, insane, sexually deviant, possibly cannablistic, sub-human or less-than human things. Because that's what that word means. It means monster. It means Not-a-Person. It means Grendal in Beowulf, the Ring-Wraiths in LotR, the in-bred, cannabalistic degenerate monsters in Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear."

That's what she's saying fans of color are. Maybe she doesn't really know what the word means and implies, but even if she just thinks it's an old spelling of "nothing" that would be offensive all on it's own.

And to think I used to respect her so much...

ETA: Apparently, there are differences between the Old Norse and Old English definitions, with the Norse one being a far worse insult and the Anglo-Saxon version being a little less on the digusting monster side and more on the outlaw side (see the discussion of several people with more expert knowledge than me in comments). Both versions are still insults, though.

Comments

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

I'm very far from an expert, given my single semester of studying Old English - some of my information comes from looking up the Old Norse root word and from things modern Norse/Germanic pagans have told me. So I'm not at all surprised to find out that I got some of it wrong, or that the Anglo-Saxon/Old English meaning is different from the Old Norse meaning.

If it's not used to refer to Grendal in the Beowulf, then I can only bow my head and confess that I'm a bad English major who didn't go back and check first, and that the nithing poles that you see in the new Neil Gaiman Beowulf movie must have misled me (it's not used at all in Lovecraft. The people in the Lurking Fear are an example of the kind of behavior that would have gotten someone declared a nithing in an Old Norse context).

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Not the Neil Gaiman-Roger Avary movie! I wrote a review here; that is so far from the original poem it hurts. Grendel gets lots of interesting words attached to him, but niðing isn't one of them. Gaiman and Avary mixed in all kinds of things from a wide variety of contexts that have little to do with the poem or Old English. (My colleagues and I now get students who think that having seen the movie replaces reading the poem. Ow, ow, ow.)

As I noted, the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary is now online, if you ever want to use it; I use it quite a lot. Sadly, the newer and far superior Dictionary of Old English being done up at the University of Toronto is only up to the letter "G" and is restricted to subscribers, as is the Corpus of Old English. (The Middle English Compendium, including the Middle English Dictionary and other useful resources, is now free: when the project made back from subscribers the money it had cost, they opened it to the public. "Nithing" also appears there, though I didn't think to look it up there until a few minutes ago.)

We seem indeed to have much more record of the word in Old Norse, as others have pointed out; I'm no expert in that language, but a quick trip to my handy dictionary shows lots more usages than the word ever saw in Old English.

What Teresa Hayden thought she was saying, I don't know. I found the usage bizarre, to say the least. I've read very few of the posts she and her husband made, because they seemed to me to be all heat and no light. You're certainly right that it's an insult, any way you look at the word. I hope my little excursion into English etymology doesn't obscure that point.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

It didn't at all for me - I find word etymologies fascinating.

[elf]

I'm no expert in Old Norse either, and I thank you for scrounging up more references. I'm directly involved with a (sub)culture that actively uses the word, and know its meaning there, and bits of the historical roots. (Kind of like most Christians know a "baptism" means "dunked under water & devoted to Jesus," and may or may not know it means any kind of blessing-by-water ritual.)

And I admit--the visceral reaction to the word, isn't quite there. I don't react to "nithing" the way I do to a handful of English obscenities & insults I could name; my gut does not clench when I hear it; my mouth does not drop open in shock.

But my eyes narrow, because I recognize it. And then I go through what I know of the meanings. And then I hit the realization that, in this case, she was deliberately trying to slip it past people who won't notice it. And there's a double-layer of contempt there, first to call people en mass by a vile moniker that was only used for individuals, and second for assuming they were too stupid or ignorant to notice.

(There has never been "war against the nithings" because they don't last long, with all good people's hands turned against them, and because to be a "nithing," a person is lacking in all the traits that would allow him to work cohesively with others toward a common goal--honor, trust, loyalty, bravery, and so on. Nithings don't happen in groups.)

What Teresa Hayden thought she was saying, I don't know.

I don't know, either. But I have my guess. TNH is not new to online communication, nor does she casually use words she doesn't understand. The inventor of "disemvowelment" is not unaware of the difference between words that hit straight and hard, and ones you have to interpret before you understand them so they lose their emotional impact without losing the intellectual meaning.

She's no stranger to subtlety and manipulation... She KNOWS. Or she should know. And for someone with her online history, there's no difference. This is a very clear attempt to deeply insult people and then mock them for not understanding the insult.

I expect her to play the "well, you can't be sure what I meant; online communication is so complex; you're overreacting" card when called on it.

She's been blogging too long to get away with "maybe that's not what I meant."

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I had read just enough from TNH to decide I didn't want to spend my time on her blog (pretty much the same went for her husband's). I followed a link from someone else to her post and thought, "That's a really strange word to use" without taking it any further at the time.

I hadn't been aware of the usage and connotations in other Germanic languages, and I've just now read your reply above and the post you linked to, having missed it the first time. I didn't know "nithing" was in current use, and I appreciate your post on insanejournal; I've certainly learned from it.

[elf]

There's an additional level of complexity/fail involved, given the history of Norse neo-Pagan groups (and, umm, some of 'em would thrash me for lumping them in with other neo-Pagans; it's a touchy subject) and the White Power movements.

I don't know TNH, nor the racist Asatru groups, well enough to sort out whether the word includes racist overtones, or just happens to be part of a language associated with a group associated with racist activities. (Mygods, that's too many layers of meta.) I know there are racist Asatru groups (the keyword to search for is "folkish"--not all "folkish" groups are racist, but all the racist ones ID as "folkish"); I don't know if they're more likely to declare people "nithing" than others, and have no idea if it's use on people outside of the groups themselves.

Plenty of modern Norse/Germanic Pagans won't have heard of the term--but none of the ones who do, think it means "lowlife scumbag." They have plenty of more colorful words for that.

As far as "current" use--there are Pagan groups working to revive/reconstruct the religions of the Norse, Egyptian (Kemetic), Celtic, Slavic, Roman, and Greek cultures. This includes active use of a huge collection of words that were never translated to English, or the translations were so mangled through the Christian filter that they're useless. (Most non-Christian forms of clergy, for example, don't translate well.) So all of those groups have at least a handful of words that are considered archaic, but are widely known within the group. Words dealing with religion and magic top the lists.