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> It should be retired. Cultural appropriation if I ever heard it. What about retiring Anglo-Saxons while at it?
by mongol 4y ago
> It should be retired.
Cultural appropriation if I ever heard it. What about retiring Anglo-Saxons while at it?
- rocqua 4y agoThe point is that the term, as used in English, was incorrectly appropriated from another language. Moreover use of the term lumps people together that have little in common. Contrast this against the term Anglo-Saxon used by a group of people to describe themselves.
- mongol 4y agoI don't think a call for retiring the term is motivated. It is a completely relevant word to apply for certain events and processes taking place in the centuries before the medieval age. People from current Scandinavia went out in the world to pillage and trade, they were called vikings (according to rune stones raised in their homelands by their families back there), and what they did has affected history. If the word is used too broadly, that is something that can be called out, but calling for retirement of the entire word is taking it too far.
- barry-cotter 4y ago> The point is that the term, as used in English, was incorrectly appropriated from another language. Language is not appropriated, it is used. A language is not property. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes never called themselves Anglo-Saxons. They were intimately aware of differences between themselves that are lost to us.
- vintermann 4y agoWhat culture? Nordic metal music culture? Neopagan culture? Because I'm Norwegian, and I've been arguing against viking as an ethnonym and mythologizing around "vikings" for decades. It really is like, as one poster above said, if we decided to describe everyone in Japan before say 1700 as "ninjas".