Nick Saban: Derogatory or not?

Impossible.

There aren't any.

I'll be here all week.

I wonder if the ESPN guy got the actual opinions of any "educated" cajuns, or if he's just pulling that out of his @ss.

My reaction to this sort of thing is to ask, "Is the community at large that the term refers to offended by his comments?"  And if they aren't, then everyone else ought to get over it. 

I think there's a fine line between being actually offended, and just kinda  kicking up a fuss about it so you can get on tv and act aggrieved.  The fact that the ESPN guy presumes to speak for all "educated Cajuns" when he clearly doesn't is probably an example of the latter. 

OMG I wish I had the pics.

Dateline 1982. Deployed to Keflavik, Iceland. There in the BOQ was a group from the La. Air National Guard. What was painted on the fuselage of their fighter aircraft. "Coonass Militia". They were a great hard partying bunch who we worked closely with and they were good professional airman, as airman go. Also a good long time friend of mine who is retired USCG married a gal from down around Belle Isle. She and all her folks are Coonasses, just ask her.

I use the term much like I'd call someone a Texan, a Yankee, a hillbilly, etc,  not as a derogatory term but as an identifier of geography or heritage.

So let me get this right.  now there is a cajun-american, an african-american and a latin-american.  So are there Yankee-americans? 

In regards to the question, I don't think that it's offensive.  I don't get offended when people call me a hillbilly when they find out I grew up in Crestvegas.  (That's the redneck rivera for those who don't know)

edit:  And yes Bear, you're just too dumb to know when you're being set upon.  Must be that uneducated part...

Not ever having heard the term applied to Cajun-Americans, I was wondering about that.  Is the term "coon-a$$" or just "coon"?  I've heard the latter used as a dergatory term for African Americans, too, but I wasn't sure if we were talking about the same thing.

Never mind. De Cracker just answered my question. 

I have heard both, but the usual term is the latter.  Depends on how racist the person is. 

What a lot folks fail to realize is that the pronouciation is continuous, one word. Not Coon but coonass. Oh here some LANG patches from the past. btw I just learned while doing my search that the PC police caught up with the Coonass Militia and made them change their name.

edit: the file is too big but Google Coonass Militia. It's interesting stuff.

Politicians and football coaches should be smart enough to refrain from telling ethnic jokes.  In today's PC world, somebody will be offended, or at least feign being offended.

Saban and Joe Biden should compare notes.

If nothing else, Saban's given LSU some material for the locker room bulletin board.

Mark

There's no country called "Africa" yet we have African American, there' no country called "Jew" yet we have "Jewish American."

For the geographically challenged like Ty, the "country" from which Cajun is derived is the Canadian/French Colonial territory of Acadia. 

Non-issue.

It sounds like a certain ESPN guy is looking for a way to stand out in the crowd of TV dunderheads talking about the Super Bowl.

"derogatory" is by social convention. Most of the country probably isn't aware of the term, but because the prefix 'coon' is a racial slur,  I'm sure that upon first hearing it many if not most would be wary of using it and it could very likely come to be considered derogatory out of over-sensitivity or sheer attention seeking on some loudmouth's part.

I'm not sure you can avoid having someone get offended even if you don't make jokes.  I can recall two examples here in NYC.  In one case, an official had people demanding a apublic apology and asking for his resgnation because he had used the word "niggardly" in a sentence.  In another case, a local pol caused similar controversy when he expressed annoyance at having to continually replace the basketball rims at a local park because they were often damaged by people "swinging on them like monkeys".  I understand the sensitivity here, but you'd have to be pretty thin-skinned not to recognize that the reference had more to do with the fact that monkeys do indeed like to swing on stuff, than to the fact that the majority of people who use the park are African American.

Thank you for that lesson BEAR.  I did not know where the term Cajun was derived.

Niggardly is a perfectly cromulent word, but I get why people wouldn't like so much the guy making the monkey reference. It's the double-entendre.

Probably just as harmlessly intended as Howard Cosell's "little monkey incident:

Cosell drew criticism during one Monday Night Football telecast in September 1983, for stating "that little monkey gets loose, doesn't he," when he referred to a play by wide receiver Alvin Garrett of the Washington Redskins. While some saw "little monkey" as a racial slur, others who knew Cosell were quick to point out that he used this term routinely in an approving way to describe quicker, smaller players of all ethnicities. Among the evidence to support this claim is video footage of a 1972 preseason game, between the New York Giants and the Kansas City Chiefs, that features Cosell referring to Mike Adamle, a 5-foot-9-inch, 197-pound Caucasian, as a "little monkey."

Source: Wikipedia