Kunlangeta

I am recording the word kunlangeta only because I had never heard it used before until this afternoon. According to an article in the New Yorker, ‘The Yupik Eskimos use the term kunlangeta to describe a man who repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, and takes sexual advantage of women, according to a 1976 study by Jane M. Murphy, an anthropologist then at Harvard University. She asked an Eskimo [Inuit] what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, and he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”’. It is said to be coming in useful in Whitehall at the moment.

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6 thoughts on “Kunlangeta

  1. ivangaskell says:

    I’m afraid that, like cake, “Eskimo” is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays, as Gwendolyn Fairfax might have put it. Many Indigenous people in North America and Greenland consider the term racially charged and offensive–not that this is your intention for one moment, of course!

  2. Richard Bram says:

    Thank you, Ivan – you beat me to it. The appropriate word is “Inuit,” what the northern Canadian peoples call themselves.

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