Who Knew About Brazil Nuts?
The Great Plotnik threw out the Brazil nuts today. Who knew?
You probably had to be here -- the discussion about Brazil nuts over the Christmas holiday. Apparently Brazil nuts, aside from being something you eat, are the focal point of a particularly incomprehensible racial slur, a slur only Grandma Joy and The Great FiveHead had ever heard, which unfortunately makes some kind of sense. Grandma Joy said her clueless white kid college students in Wisconsin told her about it.
It led to six or seven people in the extended Plotnik clan sitting around in the living room inspecting each other's feet and laughing our heads off over these innocent-looking-but-in-fact-devious members (Bertholletia excelsa) of the family Lecythidaceae.
To Plotnik they always seemed like really fatty nuts that ought to taste better than they do, but those days are over. He, and everyone else in the room that night, will be happy to swear off Brazil nuts for awhile.
Out, out, damned nut! In the trash with you!
posted by DAK @ 10:37 AM
4 Comments:
I have no idea how or when I learned this racial slur but I know it is from my childhood. I was born and raised in Maryland by a semi-predjudice Virginian Father. I imagine he's the culprit for my knowledge but cannot say for sure. Can't blame you a bit for swearing off the nut though and am pretty sure I have on a subconscious level since I can't even remember the last time I've had them. It irritates me that I don't like a nut because of something I can't even remember being told to me a long, long time ago.
I knew this would make the blog eventually...
for the record, I believe it was Grandma Joy and the Punkydunky who knew the slur, yes?
Thank You Bron. Give credit where credit is due homie!
Wait a minute! Am I to understand that you threw away the nuts and are boycotting them in the future because some ignoramus in the past gave them a nickname that was/is a racial slur?
This seems a little nuts (no pun intended) to me. I can understand insisting on calling them by their correct name (incidentally, Brazil nuts are seeds, not nuts at all), but I don't understand how not eating them will help to change a nickname that (apparently) so few people even know anymore.
I'm as fond of a boycott as the next girl, but what's your reasoning here?
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