Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 7128950" data-attributes="member: 6799649">Being dishonest is possible, but being ignorant of the word is another possibility.In America you may call someone pal, dude, guy, homey, all sorts of such terms, whether you know that person or whether you just met.In Britain we might call them mate, fella, squire, and loads of others.I called a customer of mine 'squire'. He took offence. I was surprised. His own mates were surprised at his reaction. He claimed it was a disrespectful term. I told him that its origins were from the title 'esquire', denoting a gentlemen; hardly an insult!He said no, it was disrespectful.His own mate then Googled it on his smartphone, and read out that it was a 'term of respect'; the exact opposite of his claim.He was still determined to be offended though. Because I was working, I left it alone.Who gets to decide if a term is offensive? Anyone can claim to be offended, and anyone can claim that they were not being offensive. So how do we determine who is in the right in any particular case?It cannot be that one side is always right and the other always wrong. Surely, society itself has a 'reasonable' measure such that you ask the question, "would a reasonable person have been offended by what was said?"If you don't, if you always side with those who claim to be offended regardless of how ignorant or malicious their case may be, then innocent people can lose their job when they haven't actually done anything wrong just because someone wants to make trouble or is just simply wrong about a word.</blockquote>

Verification