A waitress at Lakewood’s West End Tavern thought she’d play a harmless joke on her friends by printing hate speech on their receipt Sunday afternoon. There it is to your right.
“It wasn’t meant to be offensive,” the 23-year-old bartender told WEWS.
“Nothing about it was meant to be malicious,” the tab’s recipients concurred.
But social media, in its infinite self-propulsion, disagreed (or didn’t care). Facebook sunk its teeth into the original SnapChat message and disseminated retaliatory disgust across the internet.
This is the world we live in!
The bartender, and WEWS, for that matter — “It was all a big misunderstanding!” — suggest the takeaway from all this unpleasantness is that we should be careful about what we write, especially in an age when our vapidity and narcissism, not to mention our digital lives, are second nature.
The obvious advice (and we’ll co-sign) is that if you’re going to make a horribly offensive joke among friends, don’t document it.
But don’t for one moment pretend that it’s not offensive, that the fact of its delivery — just ironically pallin’ around with dear friends by calling them tasteless names! — negates the “joke’s” meaning.
Cleveland has a hard time with this concept. The prevailing logic around here is that even if other people find something offensive, the fact that when I say it or wear it, or whatever, I don’t intend it to be offensive is much more important. It’s the primacy of intent over content.
At any rate, there was a news van outside West End Tavern last night, and, after some hard-nosed sleuthing, we determined the mood to be “low-key.”
This article appears in May 13-19, 2015.
Wow…Thinskinned
23 year olds are stupid( I should know I was one!!!)
So let’s move on…
I’ll still go, understandably offensive to some but not me. I’d be surprised if everyone offended never made an offensive joke.
“Cleveland has a hard time with this concept” you know a lot of people from Cleveland are on the right side of both of those issues and I really suggest you not lump an entire city into one incident by one individual, or even an larger incident controlled by the MLB big shots and people who probably live there half the year. THAT is insulting, and offensive. Cleveland is a great city with open minds, hearts, and amazing people.
I’ve found the bartenders there to be unfriendly most of the time anyways.
Never put something down on paper that you aren’t comfortable with everyone else seeing, regardless of whether or not you think other people may misinterpret (or correctly interpret) it. Just because you can say whatever you want doesn’t mean you should say whatever you want.
I think it has more to do with the context of the word and not who said it or who it was said to. I mean, what if they had put the N word on there, just as a little rib. Would people not be offended? I think it’s absolutely justified for people to be offended.
Lighten. Up. Francis.
Seems insane that everyone is in a tizzy over the word “fag”, but I don’t see any mention that the recipient wrote “what a bitch” over it. They’re both equally hateful and angering words. I guess that’s the patriarchy for us.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!
23 is getting old to be a clueless, dumbassed twit. Malice seems likelier.
If it said the “N” word, what would people be saying? Maybe everything isn’t a joke to everyone and everyone shouldnt just deal with it.
This is like saying , hey I yelled “Nice ass bitch” across the street to my friend and everyone else should just deal with it even tho you don’t know its my friend.
I don’t care.
This is news? WTF!
Sam, I get your intent but its your content I have a problem with. You are in the media. You write “Stop making jokes like this one” and All I see is a support of censorship…
Who put it on SnapChat?
I find it interesting that one of the owners is a councilman in Rocky River, but that was never mentioned. Also, the owners, Bob and John Shepherd did not make a public statement on camera.