Your Momma’s So Portly...and other fat labels

[BridgeTheGap]

There is no end to the vocabulary we’ve devised to slap people with the fat label—obese, overweight, portly, soft, plump, chubby, tubby, etc. But are all these words created equal? As it turns out, no. Mark Morton reports in Gastronomica’s summer issue (subscription required) that the language we use to describe fat people smacks of race, class, and gender stereotypes.

More euphemistic words for fat are used to describe those in higher-paying professions. For example, Morton found that a Google search for “portly” resulted in descriptions of doctors, lawyers, and professors, but rarely for janitors and plumbers. And “fat teacher” turned up 10,600 hits, while a search for “fat professor” turned up only 1,190. Race was another factor influencing word-choice. Although “white man,” “white woman,” “black man,” and “black woman” all got around the same number of hits when the phrases stood alone, adding “fat” skewed the results. The phrase “fat black woman” got eight times as many hits as “fat white woman,” while “fat white man” got 12 times as many hits as “fat black man.” And black women were dubbed fat, obese, and overweight at far higher rates than the others.

Now that’s all interesting, but what does it mean? Morton concludes that our propensity for denoting black women’s weight more frequently than others' reflects not the reality of waistlines, but the reality of disenfranchisement: “It’s analogous to what happens in the schoolyard: the outsiders are the ones who get called the names, not those at the center of the clique.”

http://tinyurl.com/2zn7j2

[MissMillie]

1. before I even go to the article

"overweight" and "obese" are medical terms... I don't know that you can call them euphemisms.

[BridgeTheGap]

2. Good point. n.t

[Connonym]

4. technically "fat" is also a medical term

as with "overweight" and "obese" if you don't use them according to their correct medical meaning they are essentially euphemisms.

[Coyote_Bandit]

5. I'd say they are both euphenisms and medical terms

They are medical terms when used by someone possessing the information (height and weight) and skill to assess whether the person in question is overweight or obese.

Otherwise they are euphenisms.

I know the difference medically between being overweight and obese. But there are a lot of folks that I can't eyeball and accurately categorize.

[soleft]

3. I didn't click on the link

But in the first paragraph of the exerpt obese and overweight are referred to as simply vocubulary and language. They are not included in the list of euphemisms in the second paragraph.

[qb]

6. What a disturbing trend, aside from the fact that such labels are so dehumanizing to begin with.

Here's a label I prefer: Warm Loving Person

[youthere]

7. Overweight, and Obese are clinical classification terms ..not labels.

at least not labels in the way the author suggests. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I don't believe it's labeling someone, if you describe a fat person as "fat" any more than if you described a thin person as "thin", or a blond person..or a person in a red vest...etc...see my point? FAT is not a character attribute, it's a physical description. To me a label refers to a persons character, real or perceived..Lazy, rude, shy etc. Just my opinion. I think it would be ridiculous for a fat person to be offended by being described as fat, any more than it would offend a red-headed person to be described as having red hair.
Of course, I'm not talking about intentionally derogatory terms, but Fat, Overweight, Obese, Heavyset I don't perceive as derogatory.