Green Monkey

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My apologies. I have been using "Green Monkey" [even as a verb, they green monkeyed me] assuming the relevance would be obvious, whereas a few moments alone with a seasrch engine suggests it may be obscure.

It may be apocryphal, it may have been a real experiment, I know not, but it was a few times claimed in my hearing:

If you take a monkey and paint him green and put him back in the troop, they will attack and destroy the Different one.

True or not, a concept which from at least 7th grade on has resonated for me, so I use it to refer to the way in which a proportion of those who perceive certain of us to be different are motivated to attack and persecute.

Tasol.

Congratulations....you've discovered a substitute for the "N" word

I suppose, if you wanted to reach a wider audience, for the verb you could use "marginalise." I can't think of a socially-acceptable noun though. Maybe "Outcast" would do? Not quite so graphic, but functional.

I didn't know about the green monkey but the idea is not new, Andersen wrote a tale about it a long time ago.



Google translates the title as "Ugly Duckling" but I don't know if it's the well known title in English.

<I suppose The Butter Battle Book would also apply>

The Sneetches I do not know, but the Butrter Battle thoufgh after my day was within my son's repertoire and I know it well. A different phenomenon, I think. While the Ugly Duckling [I suppose somewhere I could dig up the Danish title] is very close in to the Green Monkey [and I ALWAYS related to it] the Butter Batrtle, like Swift's Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Lilliput [and Blefuscu?], represents to us the constant problem of two groups of people typologically and neurologically identical, thinking with the Big Brother of their movement and marching to his drum, who would be totally in agreement and great friends EXCEPT that one like the newhatched chick is imprinted on Xism and the other is staunchly Yist. The phenomenon explains most politics and theoretical schools in academia.

The Big-Endian [I do not recall if there is a formal term in the butter debate] will fight the evil of Little-Endianism as fervently as Whig ever fought Populist; but if I come along NOT AFFILIATING with either side because the whole thing is stupid and I don't even eat eggs, BOTH parties will stop what they are doing and ship me to Siberia and/or Auschwitz first.

Because to the type in question which I will resist further specifying but I think we all have seen them, NOT wearing a uniform is worse, more threatening, than being the enemy.

You can, after all, reeducate the Little-Endian to see the rror of his ways.