Talk:ethnic

The original first sense is quite good. The second sense, ("as (1) but with the implication ...") was not bad, but the idea of later senses being derived from a primary one is pretty much implicit in the dictionary format. The new attempt ("incompletely assimilated") tries to build on that notion, but I'm not sure I've really got it right.

One of the big lessons of the OED is to rely on quotations at least as heavily as definitions. Indeed, the whole point of a definition is to distill the essence of a mass of quotations. This is a good example -- the second sense would be much weaker without the illustrative quotation.

--dmh 06:11, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

ethnic as a noun is wrong!
Many Anglophones regardless of their own ethnicity incorrectly use the word to refer to various people (usually of Mediterranean decent) as “ethics”.

This near universal use of the word is racist on so many levels. --220.238.44.174 09:25, 13 November 2005 (UTC)


 * A near universal use in a language whose rules are descriptive, cannot, by definition be incorrect. Either the use is not near universal or the use is not incorrect. I will concede that "ethics" would be an incorrect term to use. "Ethnic minority" is a very cumbersome thing to repeat a lot.

LaFoiblesse 17:24, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

ethnic
A member of a minority group who keeps customs, langudge, or social ideas.

revert
(re-) Reverted POV edits by "Verbo", damaging the entry. Robert Ullmann 15:00, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

of a foreign/minority group's culture
Also ethnic euphemistically referring to non-white people as a whole. (Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, page 275) --Backinstadiums (talk) 10:57, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

RFV discussion: October–November 2021
Rfv-sense "An ethnic minority." Tagged a while ago by someone with the HTML comment "really used for a whole group? 'Blacks are an ethnic'?" Indeed, I haven't been able to find such usage: only "[such-and-such] are an ethnic group" or references to "ethnic(s)" that mean sense 1, member(s) of an ethnic group. Perhaps the person who added it thought ethnic minority meant an individual person (a definition that entry lacks, but see sense 3 of minority), but in that case this is redundant to and should be merged into sense 1. - -sche (discuss) 17:21, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

RFV-failed Kiwima (talk) 19:24, 7 November 2021 (UTC)