as most of you are aware, the term "oriental" is no longer an exceptable term unless you're speaking about a rug (or, according to other people, any "thing" that's not a person). it is now considered offensive, and has been replaced in recent years by the word "asian".

now, i'm of the belief that we should always (within reason) call people whatever they want to be called and not call them whatever they don't want to be called.

but the only reasons i've ever heard beyond "oriental is a rug" (which obviously doesn't explain a damn thing since an oriental rug is called an oriental for a reason) was that "the term 'oriental' is a european word made to describe that which is not european"...ummm yes, english is a european language, so european languages can't have words that refer to things, even in english-language debates over english language usage judged and moderated by non europeans with charges of eurocentric speech? so THAT argument was either not made well at all to me or just doesn't make any sense.

the other objection that was never really spelled out to me, but i'm able to figure, is the idea of lumping everyone from koreans to japanese to cambodians to chinese etc into one word because of certain similarities it would seem have become politically incorrect to notice...YET, the word "oriental" has just been replaced with another word (asian) in order to refer to the same exact thing (everything that oriental was ever used for) just with different syllables.

so that can't be it either.

and as far as the word "asian" goes, i really really really hate using this word to describe people from only one part of asia, because the stupidity and hypocrisy of it all just seems so rediculously dumb...but i use it, because i've also been told that east-asian or far-eastern is also unpolite and i'm not trying to disrespect anyone.

but osama, jesus, ghandi, sharon, arafat, putin, everywhere from moscow to calcutta, india to isreal, turkey to mecca, is asian. so it's obviously pretty retarded to suddenly just call SOME asians asian because you want to do a hilariously piss poor job of hiding the fact that you can tell the similarity between a vietnamese and a mongolian.

so can someone please explain to me the REAL reason oriental shouldn't be used, and please don't say "because it's a european word", because this is a european language so everything is a european word, and please don't say "because we don't want to admit that there's a shared similarity between all these peoples that isn't shared outside of those formerly described as oriental" if you're also the type of person who uses the other word to refer to the same thing anyways.

and this is the BIG ONE: all you people-formerly-known-to-eurocentric-languages as "oriental" need to help me out. is there any other word besides "asian" that i can use?