What if it did? Associating the Dutch with courage is an awful thing?
We have lots of words that are racist/bigoted. Cad/Caddie. Villain. Vandal. We've forgotton what most of them mean; only the perjorative sense remains.
Your tone is of disagreement (?), but I wrote the same thing:
> Therefore what's important is not the origins of a word, but its current associations and effects: "my car was vandalized" is OK but "that movie is gay" is not.
On Dutch courage: the meaning is the courage you get when drunk, implying that a person is not courageous when not drunk. I don't think that on the scale of bad things this idiom is very bad at all, for one the Dutch are not often victims of discrimination, and neither is the association very strong nor the meaning very negative. I'm just pointing out that in general, what matters is not the origins of a word, but its current use and effect. So the fact that "Dutch" in "Dutch courage" originally referred to the drink and not to the Dutch does not automatically make it OK.
And neither sense of 'dutch' impacts our subconscious in any way that can be rationalized. At some point it becomes a single ideogram: dutchcourage, which is void of any PC baggage.
I disagree. It contains the word Dutch, which is still the common way to refer to, well, actual Dutch people. This is not the case for villains, vandals or paddy wagons.
It implies that they can't have courage without being drunk, and certainly that's not a very nice thing to say about someone, let alone a huge group of people who obviously don't all fit that stereotype.
We have lots of words that are racist/bigoted. Cad/Caddie. Villain. Vandal. We've forgotton what most of them mean; only the perjorative sense remains.