meh, 'freedom' has never had a good, solid meaning. Kings have been using that word for centuries.
Slavery, until fairly recently has meant 'owning another human' - I mean, hell, I'll buy the use of slavery to mean 'having a choice between doing what another human wants and dying'
My problem here is expanding it to mean 'having to pay a small fee or suffer discomfort'
Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant".
The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice" is the acceptance of car infrastructure in city design and the habit of looking at the world through the needs of one's car, namely to find parking, to calculate finances based on a car's needs.
Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.
It's not really accurate to call it a racial slur. The concept of race was extremely weak before the 1800s, when eugenics took off, and slackened after WW2 (because Hitler). There were geographical prejudices (you come from a Slavic country) and "civilized" prejudices (you silly barbarians with your shaggy hair), but skin color was rarely, if ever, a factor.
Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white.
In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money, how women are emotional, etc. A germ of truth, but mainly the kind of overgeneralization we call "stereotype" today.
>In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money
Huh. I would have called those examples racism. Maybe "European racism" if I wanted to make a racist statement myself. The joke is that Europeans are just as racist as Americans; they are just more refined about it. The implication, if you tell the joke properly, is that the Americans aren't as educated or refined as the Europeans, and thus can only handle the five colors.
But certainly, from the time of the rise of nationalism onward there has certainly been discrimination and violence along ethnic lines. (and perhaps before? I'm actually really interested in racism before the advent of nationalism, and I don't have much any information.)
But is that proper? calling it racism even when it's not based on Blumenbach's white/black/red/yellow/brown categories? I mean, dividing people into the aryans/poles/slavs and treating them differently based on that classification looks like the same thing to me, save for the fact that the classification takes more effort than Blumenbach's method does.
Some words have multiple definitions. Here's one of the definitions of the word "slave"... someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; "a slave to fashion"; "a slave to cocaine"; "his mother was his abject slave"