I recently gave a speech about nature studies and referred to tadpoles as "Pollywogs"?

Question

I was immediately confronted by a listener as being "racist"??? and should not have said this word. What is the world coming to??? I only referred to this subject in the Latin Word, meaning no offence to anyone. Surely this is going too far?

I, offcourse, brushed this aside and put it down to ignorance on the listener's side. Strikes me though...you gotta be aware of other people's feelings.....could start a confrontation.

Yup....I'm a Brit.

A reference to "wogs" from Yahoo Answers.
http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index.php?qid=20061210065654AAlsEIx

Answer 1

This is a case of linguistic guilt by association. A similar stigma attaches to the word "*********", whose etymological citations in the OED go back to Chaucer in the 14th century, while those of the "n" word go back only to the 18th century. One source traces the former word to Scandinavian roots, whila another, to French.
___It's a touchy issue. On the one hand, the "n" word is so offensive that a white person would probably be best not to use "*********" so as not to raise offense unduly. But there's a limit how far one can take this, and if we eliminate every word from the language that resembles an offensive word, we'll have trouble keeping track of the banned words. Feminism did something like this with "history" and "herstory, and the result was a bit of an embarrassment, since the etymology of "history" has nothing to do with the masculine possessive pronoun, and impying that it did showed some feminists to be nit-wits.
___You have every right to confront your critic on this, and note that his or her making of false accusations against you is itself an egregious offense.
___Barry Goldwater, a U.S. Presidential candidate in 1964, was excoriated for saying, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Well, that criticism would go double for stupidity in the name of political correctness.

Answer 2

The "Wog" part can be deemed offensive as it was an abusive term being short for Western Oriental Gentleman. The Urban Slang dictionary defines Pollywog as "A boy who grows up without a father and must raise himself to be a man."

Answer 3

I looked up the word in the dictionary, and the only definition it gave was tadpole. Perhaps it's a derogatory slang term of some sort.

Answer 4

I had no idea it was a bad word either. Fortunately, I hardly ever refer to tadpoles by any name, so maybe I haven't offended anybody with the term.

Answer 5

Uh, how is this racist? What race is it used to refer to? I've never heard or read it in my life.

Eesh.

I think if you're discussing actual real tadpoles and didn't call any of your listeners pollywogs and didn't refer to any *people* as pollywogs, there's not much reason to bring race into it.

Answer 6

I always said pollywogs. the complaint might have come from a Brit.

Answer 7

Uhhhh, a guy who used to work with me was named Paul and I always called him Polly Wog, or just Wog... I had no clue this is a racist term... ooooops. :(

Answer 8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog

Answer 9

That is what I always called them!

Answer 10

I don't get it what's racist about that.