• Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
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    9 months ago

    I had to squint my eyes to notice that this was a trash fucking highlighter meme and not just a splash of unevenly spread read paint.

    Anyway. That point is pretty removed but it makes for a funny joke. This halloween I’m going to spook lots and lots of Emilies, by spamming what apparently is the new no-no word.

  • duncesplayed@lemmy.one
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    9 months ago

    I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently it was briefly used as a racial slur? etymonline.com says:

    The derogatory racial sense of “black person” is attested from 1945, perhaps from the notion of dark skin being difficult to see at night. Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Institute during World War II called themselves the Spookwaffe.

    • NightLily@lemmy.basedcount.comOPM
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      9 months ago

      Yeah and there is the target lawsuit and stuff as well.

      The word spook hasn’t just gotten fictional people in trouble. In 2010, Target apologized for selling a Halloween toy called “Spook Drop Parachuters” — literally miniature black figurines with orange parachutes. And in 2018, an elementary school in North Carolina came under fire when a student came home with “spook” and “removed” ― an offensive term to people of East and Southeast Asian descent ― on his list of vocabulary words to memorize.

  • TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com
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    9 months ago

    It makes sense, if it’s night and a black person is smiling, you only see an array of teeth floating mid-air, spooky!

    A based black guy I once saw while commuting used to walk around with a high visibility jacket, so you could see him even in the night.