Nonsense. That’s like saying a Chinese person in America didn’t intend to call a queer person a fag because they didn’t know the language, slipped up and made an old man mistake.
You do not “slip up” and say bigoted things “by mistake” unless you know they’re bigoted and have said them before.
So unless you’re making the not especially credible claim that he was taught that Italian word and no one ever told him it was offensive, I think it was a terrible excuse.
And he still needs to apologize himself, not send some lackey to do it for him.
I am a Chinese American. I can’t speak for the pope (in fact I’m atheist so I could not care less about the pope). But I can tell you that many recent immigrants who speak English as a second language are very bad at nuances in English. If someone hears the word “fag” in the context of talking about gay men, they’re not all going to pick up that it’s a slur, depending on where and how they’ve heard the term. Many of them will associate fag=gay as a matter of vocabulary. And my experience is that first gen immigrants tend to ignore or avoid pop culture so their overall exposure to language trends and usage are usually poor.
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Nonsense. That’s like saying a Chinese person in America didn’t intend to call a queer person a fag because they didn’t know the language, slipped up and made an old man mistake.
You do not “slip up” and say bigoted things “by mistake” unless you know they’re bigoted and have said them before.
So unless you’re making the not especially credible claim that he was taught that Italian word and no one ever told him it was offensive, I think it was a terrible excuse.
And he still needs to apologize himself, not send some lackey to do it for him.
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I am a Chinese American. I can’t speak for the pope (in fact I’m atheist so I could not care less about the pope). But I can tell you that many recent immigrants who speak English as a second language are very bad at nuances in English. If someone hears the word “fag” in the context of talking about gay men, they’re not all going to pick up that it’s a slur, depending on where and how they’ve heard the term. Many of them will associate fag=gay as a matter of vocabulary. And my experience is that first gen immigrants tend to ignore or avoid pop culture so their overall exposure to language trends and usage are usually poor.
Even if you’re right and this is the case about Francis, he still needs to apologize himself.