tom moody
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Instead of "gook" our soldiers are using the term "hadji" to refer to an enemy combatant (sorry, liberatee) in Iraq and Afghanistan. (As in "killing some hadjis" or "mowing down some hadjis.") This article spells it "hajji" or "hodgie" and says it refers to the Arab term for "pilgrim to Mecca," but the writer is either over 60 or grew up in a country without TV because any fool knows Hadji, the Calcutta orphan with occasional mystical powers, who was Jonny Quest's sidekick. I mean, duh. The show has been in endless syndication since the '60s so it's not just a boomer thing. A semi-educated guess is the trend started in Afghanistan and spread to the Iraq theatre; maybe that's wrong, but it seems a lot more likely than appropriating "pilgrim to Mecca" as a derogatory term.