USC Professor Taken Out Of Classroom After Using Chinese Filler Word That Sounds Like English Racial Slur

Those who teach foreign languages to English-speaking students, especially American students, will have to be careful what words they teach from now on, lest a foreign-language word sound like an offensive English word.

At the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, communications professor Greg Patton recently gave an online class in which he explained a filler word in Chinese meaning “that.” Patton explained to his class that the filler word, “nega,” is akin to saying “um” or “like” in English.