Interesting Links for 27-12-2018

[andrewducker]

The Science Behind Making Your Child Smarter

(tags: children education intelligence iq )

The best free games of 2018

(tags: games review free )

Twitter is suspending Jewish people for saying "goy"

(tags: jewish Jews twitter OhForFucksSake )

Your memories change whenever you recall them - even when you're telling stories

(tags: memory psychology )

Comments

[dewline]

Item three is tellingly disturbing.

[conuly]

Twitter is suspending Jewish people for saying "goy"

I guess they needed something for the mods to do once they finally wiped all the neo-Nazis off their platform.

[cmcmck]

Since when was 'goy' / 'goyim' an insult?

Shame they don't do something about those gauji (non Roma people) using 'didakoi' as an insult to all travellers.

Especially when they can't even spell it! I't's 'Didaki' and it means part Romani, which I'm proud to day that I am.

[mme_n_b]

It's been an insult since forever. I would not use it to refer to anyone, and would ban anyone using it from my home (unless it's used as part of telling an old joke, e. g. "goyische kopf", in which case they'd just get a stern talking-to). As a general rule-of-thumb, a Jewish person finding themselves in need of the word "goy" is trying to say something racist.

That said - I'd consider them a low-priority racist, definitely much lower than the actual "let's kill all the impure" Neo-Nazis out there on Twitter, and Twitter's priorities indicative of broader disturbing culture trends.

[cmcmck]

Quite.

Fwiw, I also have Jewish ancestry although I am not myself Jewish and as I said, I'd be much more concerned by the misuse of 'didaki' which gauji have managed to turn into an insult to all travellers.

I suspect 'gaujo'/'gauji' is a similarly lightweight insult to 'goy'/'goyim' but you really need to have at least some Romani blood to even know the words.

I suppose it's indicative of something else that I know both..........

[mme_n_b]

I have no Romani blood whatsoever, but I do know what a gayjo is, and would not knowingly associate with anyone who uses it. Is there a reason you choose to use it when "non-Roma" or, more precisely, "some racists", would do as well? On the other hand, I have never heard "didaki" - where is it used? Is it similar to "cygani"?

[cmcmck]

Gaujo is simply the AngloRomani word for non Roma people. I use it because my Romani grandfather used it. I don't have as much Romani as I should, but shame persuades parental people to hide these things (I only found out about the Jewish ancestry and the Sho'ah connection ten years or so back and I'm now in my sixties). :o(

I hope you would associate with Roma folks should you meet them- it's a bit of a commonplace.

Didaki is the AngloRomani word for someone of part Romani ancestry and simply doesn't usually have the load it is given by being used as an insult by non traveller people. I own the label quite happily.

[mme_n_b]

"Goy" is also a commonplace word. So is "gypsy". It's unfortunate, but not at all a reason to loosen one's criteria and admit people who use these more than once.

I still don't get where and by whom "didaki" is used - I have not heard it in USA or Russia. Is it a Great Britain thing? An "around Wellington" thing? A "all English-speaking word except the ignorant" thing?

[cmcmck]

It's an AngloRomani word. As you'll know, the traveller languages are pretty dialectal and I don't know how widespread particular words might be.

The problem with it has become that it gets used by people who don't know its actual meaning to insult travellers in general.

[mme_n_b]

I got the origin, I got the meaning, I know the dialectal, what I don't get is "who uses it as an insult" :) But it really doesn't matter :)

[cmcmck]

Sorry- I didn't make myself clear.

Blame the time of year! :o)

Travellers in general aren't liked by fair proportion of the settled British population and the mispronounced 'didakoi' get used as an insult against all manner of travelling folk, Romani or not.

[mme_n_b]

Britishism - got it :) Thank you :)

[calimac]

Well, I don't know anything about Twitter, so how strict their banning policies are or how evenly they enforce them is not something I can comment about.

But I can say something about being Jewish, and to deny that there's anything negative about "goy/goyim" is disingenuous, especially if you're defending it by its etymology. Etymologies have nothing to do with current connotations, and I could cite the innocent etymologies of some pretty toxic words.

"Goy" is not a racial epithet, and it'd be absurd to imagine it uttered as a deliberate insult, but as used by Jews it does have a connotation of dismissiveness. I myself do not use "goy/goyim", which refer to people, and it's for that reason that I don't. However, "goyische", an adjectival form, is a regular part of my vocabulary, which I use for things or behaviors in general society that strike me as highly alien in style to Jewish culture as I know it, because what I'm saying is alien to me is not the people but some specific things that they do.

[ninetydegrees]

Thanks for clarifying. It's easy to paint words like these (or similarly 'gringo' or 'gaijin') as pejorative/insulting when you're part of the 'non-X' group and don't really understand their usage.

[calimac]

I may not have been entirely clear. "Goy" is pejorative, but it's just mildly pejorative. It isn't an expletive or an crude epithet, and my mind rebels against the thought of it being used as one. But it is dismissive, and perhaps a little condescending.

[ninetydegrees]

No, you were perfectly clear that it was. I never knew if it was the non-X group who wrongly thought it was pejorative or if it really was and if so, to what degree and in what sense. *My* bad for not being clear. :)

[pseudomonas]

I agree it can be pejorative, but I think it very much depends on which Jewish subcommunity you've grown up with how much you're used to using Hebrew (or Yiddish) jargon rather than English, and hence how much it might be the default word to signify "non-Jew".

With my upbringing (middle-class London Reform Ashkenazi), I'd only use it if I were using it for rhetorical effect; "non-Jew" would be the default, unmarked form, and "gentile" a consciously formal-register term.

[pseudomonas]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshivish is a pretty poor article, but gives a moderately extreme example of a sociolect that is particularly enriched with Yiddish and Hebrew vocabulary

[ninetydegrees]

"The Science Behind Making Your Child Smarter"

Cut the obligatory comment that IQ, academic success and intelligence are very different things, which the author should clarify in their intro if they did their job correctly. High IQ children may and may not have their own set of difficulties, and these can change as they grow up. That being said I've heard a neuroscientist say recently that intellectual stimulation in the very early years seems to matter even more than what we thought it did and that the gap between certain kids and others is more and more difficult to bridge once you get past these key years. I don't want to believe it can't be done but it seems to correlate what we observe as teachers. OTOH overstimulation is also a thing...