One can make an argument that a violent event is potentially implicated in a mine, a bomb, or an IED, however the event itself is explicated in accordance with the properties of the devices.
A journalist is being pompous. "Poor" became a derisive word, often used in other contexts such as, "That poor dog needs a bath," or "You're being dropped from the chess team because of your poor performance in last three tournaments." So it has heavy negative connotations that go beyond economic poverty. People simply get tired of words and look for new ones. "Busted" was in common use for a long time, but now it generally means "arrested" or at least "caught doing something one shouldn't be doing." Notice how he danced around the ethnicity issue, using eight syllables to call them "persons of Hispanic descent" instead of "Latinos," or simply "Hispanics," which was acceptable jargon forty years ago. I don't understand. It is the thread topic! If there's any digression, it's into the minutiae of the construction of explosive devices. Since the Linguistics subforum doesn't get a lot of traffic, I generally don't mind digressions. (Now that I've said that, don't test my patience!)
You see, that was the point of the thread. Why do you have to be so explicit as to use the term "economically disadvantaged" when the use of the word "poor" in that context would preclude the derisive meaning? The other issue is the same. Are Hispanic people annoyed by being called Hispanic or Latinos? I doubt it, unless the context would make it derogatory. I write books for a hobby (I'm certainly not making money out of it!) and I try to keep the prose - and epecially the dialogue - nice and crisp so that the readers stay interested. I really hate verbosity.
I agree. Unfortunately the context is almost always derogatory. (I speak from personal experience) I agree with your basic premise about vebosity, in the sciences for sure, but in the arts there is greater expression of analogy allowed, so it depends on the entertainment value of the information. Life includes story telling and analogy, which can be an excellent way to communicate an abstract idea, a "universal truth". The future is Implied in what we communicate today; every one contributes a tiny little part of an Implication of the future by the addition of an experience which was retold and is now considered when such matters are addressed.. The Implicate is the dreamlike vision of the next instant IMO, which emerges during quantum suspension (IMO) where the next reality is formulated. The Explicate, which we call Reality is the weakest of all enegertic systems and is fluid and fleeting, forever flying apart from moment to moment, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and that's in our neighborhood, where we live, for a little while, and then we too change and eventually disappear. But the process keeps going on long after we're gone.! The Past is the measurement in time of the duration of the Explicate (the timeline of physical expression) The Now is the Explicate, and becomes the Past every moment of time after the Now (recording the timeline of physical expression) The Future is the Implicate, every moment in the future is a physical probability, it just has had no physical exression yet, and it is only a probability..
That's unfortunate. Hmm, interesting. Why do you use these terms instead of the usual ones, if they are equivalent?
If I were writing that sentence, of course I'd start with the shortest version: "The victims were poor Latinos who were..." and I'd stop right there because "poor Latinos" is a glaring stereotype, like "poor blacks" or "poor Indians" (the Hopi, not the people from Mumbai). Or "rich Jews," for that matter. People of Latin American ancestry are not a homogeneous demographic in the USA. For decades, the only large population of people whose parents spoke Spanish were Mexican immigrants or Mexican-Americans. We simply called them "Mexicans" and nobody fussed over the fact that at some date before my birth the majority of them were American citizens and should be called "Americans." Pretty much the same thing happened after the communist takeover of Cuba and hundreds of thousands of Cubans rafted, floated or swam to Florida. (Yes I'm exaggerating but that's how it felt to a lot of them and some actually did raft over.) We talked about "Cubans" even after the parents were naturalized, the children were born here, and the migration-by-raft attenuated. Then when refugees started coming up from El Salvador, we realized that we needed a new word because no one could pronounce "Salvadoreño." So we kept coming up with names for all people of Latin American ancestry, whether first-generation immigrants or natural-born citizens. "Hispanic," "Latino," none of them caught on. The children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants decided that the regions on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border comprise a place named Aztlán, without thinking ahead and realizing that the demonym for people from Aztlán is Azteca, which was already taken. So they picked up "Chicano," a way-cool contraction of "Mexicano," which (I believe) is almost unknown outside of the Southwest, is only used by young people, and refers only to folks of Mexican ancestry anyway. So we're still blundering around, trying to figure out what to call people of Latin American ancestry without making them angry. By the time we come up with the name, it will probably be obsolete because they'll just be one more flavor in the Melting Pot. After all, when's the last time you heard someone called an Irish-American or an Italian-American? We still say Asian-American and Arab-American, but how long will that last? As immigrant communities merge into the mainstream, their identity is diluted by intermarriage. My mother was a full-blooded second-generation Czech-American (or Bohemian-American as they said in those days), but she never advertised it and only called herself American.
Thanks for the perspactive Fraggle. I suppose the intention of the piece was that the writer was implying a racial motive by the towing company. In that case it would have had more impact if he'd used the 'poor Latino' sterotype wording, so was this a deliberate attempt to tone that down, just an attempt at packing out his article, or in line with publisher's guidelines? Or maybe he's just pompous.
I don't know what kind of publication he works for, but as a writer I can say that we're all very careful about topics that touch on racism.
