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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9686884" data-attributes="member: 6799660">I'm a little confused. I haven't re-watched the episode, but from the description it sounds like the guy was relaying the story about a tattoo he got when he was a teen that was cringe-worthy in the fiction, is that right? Isn't that our modern interpretation as well? This seems less like a '90s show has blackface' situation and more like a 'Red Dwarf episode where Rimmer recounts wearing blackface to a secondary school costume party as an example of ways he's always been clueless and accidentally harmful' situation. If you don't watch stuff from ~1995-2000 very often, it is easy to forget just how... not yet solidified a lot of our modern tech situation was at the time. A lot of things could have gone one way instead of the way it did end up going (calling it the "net" and not the "web," for instance). TV writers (perhaps especially of the 90s) seem to be inherently poor at this kind of thing. Perhaps because it has to sound different, but recognizable, and seamless/low-mental-processing-required enough not to distract from the actual line being delivered. Unfortunately, that's not how slang actually works -- where you just have to know that 'drip' refers to style; or maybe there's an explanation for what 'rizz' (derived from 'charisma') means, but it's one or more steps removed, and those steps aren't going to be stated in the sentence in which it is used.</blockquote>

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