• TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Languages evolve over time. The term “to serve” is derived from the Latin word for “slave”. That does not mean it’s somehow offensive to use the term to describe the job of soldiers.

    The modern day “riced” comes from “R.I.C.E” which stands for “race inspired car enhancement”. If you rice a car, it means you put components that look like race car components but are actually just cosmetic. Fake vents, huge spoilers on family cars, exhausts that are optically bigger, etc. The orange Japanese car in the linked article is an example of that. 70s Japan had renown ricing culture so I guess that’s where the R.I.C.E and the racist “rice burner” split.

    Nowadays people who use the term “riced” don’t even know that at some point in time it had something to do with Asian cars or bikes. It’s even common to jokingly associate it with the food with the same name to spite other car nerds because you can “um actually” bait someone to correct you that it has nothing to do with food. Which is obviously not true according to the article but if 99 % of people don’t know the racist origin, it’s not an issue at all to use the word.

    • Zozano@lemy.lol
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      5 months ago

      I can’t find any source to indicate Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement was ever a term that existed as anything other than the Japanese version of an N-word-pass.

      That is to say: the acronym only exists as a means to explain why I should be allowed to continue calling your car a RICEr.

      The problem here is that someone fabricated an explanation for why they should be allowed to continue to say RICE, in response to a fallacious argument for why they shouldn’t be allowed to.

      The term is so far removed from any malicious origin, that some people wouldn’t even know they should feel offended, unless someone told them they should be.