'I blame the Ethnics'

My brother just asked me whether it's politically correct to refer to people as 'ethnics'.

Apparently some of the boys in his class had been blaming 'the ethnics' for world poverty and global warming.

I told him that it is gramatically incorrect to refer to people as 'ethnics', which probably means that it's not politically incorrect, just stupid.

I looked it up to be sure, and the word 'ethnic' means 'referring to people grouped according to a common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin'.

So unless you state their common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin at the time of calling them 'an ethnic' it is basically meaningless. We are all 'ethnics'.


These are the same boys who, after being inspired by the school's Enterprise Day, made a catalogue of weapons, and are planning to import them from the USA and sell them to their class mates.

Evidently they are a group of boys who are a few standard deviations short of the mean, if you catch my drift.... ;-)

And don't worry about the blackmarket weapons dealing - apparently they are a bit stuck, because all the American websites that sell weapons need a Visa card, which none of them have.

One boy's older brother has got one, but the last I heard, he was worried about going to jail, and so is not letting them use it.