NBA fines Meyers Leonard $50,000, suspends him from Heat activities for antisemitic slur

[mahatmakanejeeves]

NBA fines Meyers Leonard $50,000, suspends him from Heat activities for antisemitic slur

Link to tweet

[marble falls]

1. Haven't heard that one in years. Can't we even retire one hateful word.

[underpants]

2. I thought Meyers Leonard was a law firm

Or big pharma.

[Rustyeye77]

3. Can someone tell what word or slur he said?

I can’t find it.

[Ace Rothstein]

4. K word used to slur Jewish people.

[Rustyeye77]

5. Lovely...

What a dick.

[Behind the Aegis]

6. In case some are interested...

We need to talk about 'Kike' -- how did the slur originate anyway?

Everyone knows what the word “kike” means, but not everyone agrees on where the word comes from. That mystery is back in the headlines with yet another viral use of the slur — this time, it was NBA player Meyers Leonard who unleashed the word during a heated gaming moment.

“Dictionaries prefer to say that its origin is unknown, which is right but uninspiring,” Anatoly Liberman wrote on the Oxford English Dictionary blog in 2009, as part of a series he did on ethnic slurs.

And to make matters more complex, the OED was unable to officially identify any uses of “kike” before 1904. That means we move to the world of theories.

One intriguing theory is that “kike” comes from Yiddish. In the “Joys of Yiddish,” Leo Rosten notes that the word kike “was born on Ellis Island when there were Jewish migrants who were also illiterate (or could not use Latin alphabet letters. When asked to sign the entry-forms with the customary “X”, the Jewish immigrants would refuse, because they associated an X with the cross of Christianity.”

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Posted in the Jewish Group & Language & Linguistics.