At first I thought the fine was Draconian for simply using a racial slur but scanning the article it was an extensive defamatory campaign against the plaintiff so all is well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwog

Wow. Interesting.

Wow. I wonder if by “wogs” he meant non-Scientologists, or Italians, Greeks, etc.? Possibly both 🙂

Interesting, Alco. We’re all such mixtures here.

My mother’s mother was from Calabria – “toe of the boot”. She was very Asiatic looking – beautiful, really – she was quite beautiful, and tall for her day, with olive skin and ink black hair and eyes.

My mother’s father came from Rome or somewhere nearby. He was quite short, had light brown hair and eyes.

Out of the 8 children, only my mother and one of her brothers got their father’s coloring, the light brown hair and brown eyes. The other six all had the ink black hair and the very dark eyes, almost black and kind of slanted, and the olive skin.

Yet ALL of them came out short – quite short. Not one of them got the tall gene from their mother!

Half Italian? As Tony Soprano would say, what part of the boot do your people come from? As for me, my great grandmother Lowe was a Giannini whose grandfather immigrated from Tuscany around 1773 and was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson.

Which I find quite surprising given THEIR racist background.

All I can say is amen to that!

You’re welcome, Aquamarine. I remember reading Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky, in which he asked his Scientologist roommate (in the UK) if he had any dislikes, only to be shocked to be told ‘only wogs’.

Interesting story about NSW, as unlike Victoria, SA and WA, it was one of the states that didn’t ban Scientology.

It’s a little awkward, yes. With being not an English native speaker, I didn’t even know the word before encountering it in the context of watching scientology ever again, as their more or less derogative term for non-scientologists. And Hubbard re-defined and made up so many words, so, ok, there’s one more, meh. Eventually I happened to read – most likely as side remark in a Tony Ortega article – that it was an already existing word, and then not what I suspected to perhaps be some version of “idiot”, but one with a weird racist background. Duh!
So if I ever would have used it elsewhere before I knew that, then as part of some kind of insider joke about scientology weirdness, but I’d say that could still have ended very awkward depending on who would have listened, and then for more than one reason! Lol