At least that’s what I’ve been told. All hearsay, take as you will. hooray for pedantry. Hopefully I’ll learn something newly useless today when some scholar of pejoratry (does that have an ‘ology/oligist term for it?) comes in and schools us.

And yes, I have been called a ‘krout’ before. With intent of meanness. Some people are pretty lost. Hard not to giggle back at them though.

My understanding is that “jerry” in “jerry-built” is of uncertain origin. Given the timing on the scene it does predate the “Jerry” or “Gerry” for “German” but it could actually derive from Jury-rig.

pedant mode on/

Jury-rigged means built for emergency use, high quality is implied (it IS for the USN, y’see).

Jerry-built means poorly built or of cheap materials. “Jerry” being derived from “jack” not German. If that’s what you meant, …
pedant mode off/

Can you tell I’m surfing the web instead of tending to other, more useful but less fun things? 🙂

Even so, you’ll find most people of asian decent (or who even look asian) are quite offended at the implication that they are good at math. This might seem like a positive trait, but it also puts expectations that may not be realistic, especially on an individual basis.

Down here in the south it’s still sadly common to hear “n*- rigged,” and when avoiding that it almost always defaults to “jerry rigged” (not to be confused with jury rigged, which is a sailing term, and has nothing to do with the supposed improvisational mechanical skills of my ancestry during WWII). Not that I get offended, I’m not sure you can actually offend a person of german decent with the standard slanders. They’re just too silly.

lol@ the total misunderstanding. I’m Buddhist. I’m a godless atheist. I’m not a noisy version of either, to be sure, but generally when people discover they can pin the “buddhist” label on me they accept it much more readily than one of those gawdless jerks. I think they assume I believe in some primitive spirit god thing that’s really their christian god and that I just haven’t “heard the good news about jesus” yet.

Which would explain why they like to preach to me. It’s funny to me, but they tend to get offended when I explain the silliness.

So JefFlyingV: from my experience, no, they do not consider us equals. They consider us ignorant, but friendly potential converts.

They also seem to be shocked that I’m not 60+ years old, bald, and wearing a saffron robe. The misunderstandings run deep.

“Jew someone down”–I don’t use it and wouldn’t want to, but in some interpretation it isn’t *that* bad. If we believe that certain sub-groups in the populous share certain cultural traits, like about the role of bargaining/haggling in merchant transactions, then it is just using one group as an exemplar case of this innocuous–even wise–activity. Haggling is a big part of many cultures, like in Arabic markets, etc. If there had been more Arabs around in the 1940s, maybe we would be saying “Arab someone down”. I agree it is unseemly to use a generalization of a group of people as a figure of speech, and reinforces “person = group member” thinking (which I detest), so it is something to be dispatched, but I don’t think the content should be necessarily seen as anti-Semitic, unless one believes it necessarily means that Jews are *greedy* and not just effective hagglers. But these are not the same; a Jew could drive a hard bargain and later that day make a big donation to a children’s hospital.

But at least all these people have faith, even if it is the wrong faith. The faithless … the godless … that is an entirely different story…. I think not. I think this has to end.

Try to end us, you smug ethnic Christian! Just because we are faithless doesn’t mean we should not be accepted into positions of authority. Did they not teach the constitution at Yale?

a room made in our secular system of general meaning and perception that removes the burden of proof of the possible existences of God and the afterlife and places it squarely in the context secular probable likelihood at around %60 to %80 probable occurrence.

Uh, what?

I’m sorry, could you say that in some other way? I have no idea what you just said, and I’m not sure anyone else does either.