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Saturday 3 December 2011

Different coloured puppet. Negonym a negated hononym.

There was a childrens television show called 'Sooty and Sweep', a puppet show now long gone. But i was interested in the  puppet named 'Sooty'. Sooty being an old fashioned bigoted term for someone of black descent .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7826701.stm - article on the 'Prince Of Wales' calling a polo chum a sooty.
I read in the papers that some people campaigned to change the name of the puppet, since Sooty has negative connotations. Sooty and Sooty now become a hononym. That is, a word that has different meanings but pronounced  and written the same.
Something that interested me, as an artist i was interested in how a word created as a name for a puppet bear in the 1950's can now be looked upon as racist in 2000 +.
And the censorship of words that gradually are being removed from our lexicons.
Another racial orientated hononym might be spade and spayed. In England we 'call a spade a spade', but this has fallen out of use now due to its racial connotations.

I am researching if there is an actual word for a racially orientated hononym and if not, might i created one and claim it. If not i intend to propose 'Negonym' that is 'a negated hononym'.
In any case this painting is a working through of these general ideas,

Thanks for the high views on this artwork. This post is in edit and i will add a more detailed explanation as well as new work on this theme.

Thank you for reading , if you have comments please leave them i always reply.

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