I've been wondering...is the term 'pow wow' totally and completely racist now?! I mean, when I taught elementary school (shudder), we couldn't say "sit Indian style, you little brats"...we had to say "criss-cross applesauce" which always A: made me want to spin my clothes around backwards and Jump! Jump! and B: made me hungry. So does that mentality extend beyond the way we tell little mongrels to quit wiggling and just be freaking still?
I literally used the term 'pow wow' five times last week - the first time on accident (sorta), but then as a little experiment on how people would react. Naturally, because I work with the least funny people on God's green earth, no one wanted to play my game with me... boo.
"Hey coworker A, can we pow wow about that one thing you tried to dump on my plate?!"
"Listen, coworker B, I've told you how to do this like fourteen times, and you keep screwing it up. Do we need to pow wow about it again?"
"Yeah, I just had a pow wow with coworker X about that one thing he said he was gonna do, but didn't..."
NO. FREAKING. REACTION. WHATSOEVER (but you bet your sweet melons that if I'd eaten something with more than eight grams of fat in it, there'd be an uproar!). This experiment clearly needs some tweaking and revisitation.
So, Kal...give it to me straight: am I a racist asshole, or an old-fashioned wordsmith?!
