hadespussercats wrote:I actually didn't know Paki was an insult until I was in grad school. I mentioned needing to make a run to the packie's, because where I come from, that's short for "package store" or "place to buy booze."
A classmate from London was horrified, until we sorted out the confusion.
It's impossible to know what nickname is offensive and what isn't.
Paki is offensive, but Brit is not and Pole is not. It's all arbitrary, and often manufactured by groups with an agenda that want to control the language.
The name "Pakistan" is a recently made up name in the first place, and could very easily be deemed offensive. It never existed before it was coined by a Cambridge College student (who also was a Muslim nationalist), and he devised it as followsL P=Punjab, A=Afghania (a name for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), K=Kashmir, S=Sindh. An "i" intruded later to ease pronunciation. The suffix -stan in Persian means "home of" and in Sanskrit means "place". It's an acronym with a suffix.