Patterico's Pontifications

6/13/2014

Googling “Bigotry”

Filed under: General — Dana @ 10:47 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Type the word “bigotry” in the Google search bar and this is what pops up:

Untitled-1

(I just tried it and it does.) Below the definition, a sentence using bigotry is provided: “the report reveals racism and right-wing bigotry”

Their source is the Oxford Dictionary and this is what is determined to be a credible example of using the word in a sentence. Other dictionaries choose not to use inflammatory sentences for their examples:

Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com, meanwhile, do not use “right-wing” in association to bigotry in their definitions. Merriam’s sentence: “He was labeled a bigot after making some offensive comments.”

When asked for a comment about this, Google responded:

“Google Search surfaces data from Oxford Dictionary when providing definitions on our search result pages.” What’s more, we hear Google plans to reach out to Oxford Dictionary to flag the above “right-wing bigotry” sentence as inappropriate.

I can just picture all the Googlites furrowing their brows, straining to figure out exactly why this might of some concern…I don’t get it…It’s true in both usage and context…What’s the problem??

–Dana

13 Responses to “Googling “Bigotry””

  1. Great. Now we get to add dictionaries to the list of propaganda in our lives.

    felipe (960c75)

  2. I looked it up in the Palermo English Dictionary and got: “The Ponderosa pine is a bigotry.” (Ducks)

    nk (dbc370)

  3. The thing that strikes me here is that it’s an example of bigotry for Google to tarnish those with different opinions than they have (conservatives) as bigots.

    Dustin (0431a0)

  4. Bigotry is the hatred of Christians by Democrats.

    Patrick (f70e42)

  5. R.I.P. Chuck Noll, four-time Super Bowl Champion coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers

    Icy (be2576)

  6. unexpectedly!

    teh H8n not teh death…

    redc1c4 (abd49e)

  7. flag the above “right-wing bigotry” sentence as inappropriate

    Exactly. It should read, “the report reveals right-wing racism and bigotry.”

    kosisok (87f4ce)

  8. Strange you should point this out.

    Yesterday or the day before I googled a phrase to try and find out about the lawsuit against breitbart’s wife, and to my shock, a box came up like the one above which stated that Sherrod was suing the nicest person in LA.

    But of course now I can’t remember what exact phrase I used, and I can’t get on the computer I did the search to check.

    scrubone (e0a501)

  9. The following correlates with the astonishing bigotry/racism (and when I use those words, I really mean it—I don’t inflate their definition as today’s PC-brigrad is prone to do) of the most famous liberal/Democrat US presidents of the 20th century.

    I’m referring to Woodrow Wilson (a self-described progressive/liberal who initiated Jim Crow laws), Franklin D. Roosevelt (who supported quotas against Jews and said anti-Semitism in Europe during the rise of Hitler was the fault of Jews), Harry Truman (who desegregated the US military but spoke and wrote like an out-and-out Klanner in private and semi-private—he wouldn’t allow TV producer David Susskind into his home during the 1960s because Susskind was a Jew) and Bill Clinton (America’s “first black president” who has been known to use the “n” word vituperatively and casually in private conversations—and told Ted Kennedy during the campaign in 2008 that an Obama in the past would have been relegated to serving coffee to people like him and Teddy).

    theblaze.com, February 2014: The author of a German study that examined thousands of anti-Semitic hate messages told an Israeli newspaper that she was “very surprised” to discover that only 3 percent came from those described as members of the political “far-right.”

    Monika Schwarz-Friesel, a linguistics professor at the Technical University of Berlin, and her team read 14,000 letters and emails addressed to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and to Germany’s Central

    “I wanted to find out how modern anti-Semites think, feel and communicate,” Schwarz-Friesel told Haaretz.

    The study concluded that a majority of the messages – 60 percent – were sent by educated Germans, including university professors and priests. That finding shattered the research team’s initial assumptions.

    “At first, we thought that most of the letters would be sent by right-wing extremists,” Schwarz-Friesel said. “But I was very surprised to discover that they were actually sent by people from the social mainstream – professors, Ph.D.s, lawyers, priests, university and high-school students.”

    Asked about the researchers’ “surprised” reaction to their findings, Zuroff said: “It’s very simple. They think that they share common values with liberal, humanistic, ostensibly sane Germans but part of problem is that some of those people have deeply embedded anti-Semitism that sometimes manifests itself in [hate] letters.”

    “We found that there is hardly any difference in the semantics of highly educated anti-Semites and vulgar extremists and neo-Nazis,” Schwarz-Friezel told the American Jewish news site the Forward in December. “The difference lies only in style and formal rhetoric, but the concepts are the same.”

    Mark (75db68)

  10. Nice little kossack turdlet up there.

    JD (7f1f56)

  11. Bing.

    mg (31009b)

  12. I prefer a sentence like “the soft bigotry of low leftwing expectations”.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  13. Self-referencing irony is the best kind.

    Kevin M (b357ee)


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