[Wulfschilde]

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc ... cial-slur/

The University of Southern California has placed a professor on leave after he said a Chinese word that sounds similar to a racial slur in English while teaching a communications class.

Greg Patton, a professor at the university’s Marshall School of Business, was giving a lecture about the use of “filler words” in speech during a recent online class when he used the word in question, saying, “If you have a lot of ‘ums and errs,’ this is culturally specific, so based on your native language. Like in China, the common word is ‘that, that, that.’ So in China it might be ‘nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.’”

I read this and found it so funny that I just had to post it somewhere. One of the ironies here is that "nèi ge" does not actually sound very much like the racial slur in question. It's also a very common word. If you are fishing for things to be offended about, this is a stretch but for someone to be placed on leave for basically speaking Chinese shows how crazy the environment in colleges has gotten. You literally could not speak Chinese without using this phrase, so basically now if you speak Chinese in liberal colleges you can get in trouble for it.

[Rancid]

LOL. Whoever called for putting this professor on leave should be shot.

I remember when working in China, I would hear that word very often.

Russel Peters did a whole comedy bit on Nei ga like 10 years ago.

[Wulfschilde]

Bizarrely enough, I was taught to say "na ge", possibly so as not to offend black people But I realized later that it is not the most common usage because no one understood what I meant by "na ge" and I had to start correcting it to "nei ge" which helped. Although the ultimate guide for whether a Chinese person will understand your Chinese is how much they want to understand it...