Sunday, September 23, 2012

Campbell's soup features Mock Spanish

This soup, chicken with quinoa and chilis, was quite good.  However, the package contains the phrase "no problemo."  Really, Campbell's?  This is a disturbing use of what linguistic anthropologists call "Mock Spanish."  One of the scholars who's written most about this usage is Jane Hill (University of Arizona); here's a link to a paper on Mock Spanish by Professor Hill.

As Hill writes, "... everyday talk, of a type that is almost never characterized (at least by Anglos) as "racist'', is one of the most important sites for the covert reproduction of this racism. "Mock Spanish'', the topic of this paper, is one example of such a site."

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After a year: genocide by any other name

And the name, I learned this week, is: The Dahiya Doctrine.  Mehdi Hassan explains here .