Filthy English, page 32
A gook is a south-east Asian – it’s US military Vietnam War slang of unknown derivation. Spook as an offensive term for a black person comes from the word’s earlier sense of ghost. It’s no older than the 1940s. The black American fliers known as the Tuskegee pilots called themselves the Spookwaffa. (But the BBC spy show, Spooks, was renamed MI-5 for the US.) A spic, according to Stone the Crows, Ayto and Simpson’s Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, is a derogatory US word for a ‘Spanish-speaking person from Central or South America or the Caribbean’. They give the derivation as coming from ‘spiggoty’, itself a shortening of ‘no spika da English’. As a non-expert, I find it more likely that it’s a corruption of ‘Hispanic’.
Micks are shortened Michaels – an Americanism, mostly. To the English, the Irish were shortened Patricks – Paddies. Though a guinea is an Italian or Spaniard, it actually refers to the West African country, the idea being that they are as dark-skinned as someone from Guinea – i.e. they look like a black African. Honkey comes from Hungarian. When there was an influx of Hungarian labourers to the US, white Americans took to calling them ‘hunkies’. Sometime before the 1950s when the word was first noted, black Americans changed the pronunciation a little and generalized it to include all white people. Spade? As in black as the ace of spades.
Wog was first recorded in 1929. Sometimes it refers to any foreigner, sometimes just to black ones. ‘We have travelled some way from the days when Wogs began at Calais,’ commented the Times Literary Supplement in 1958 – the year of the Notting Hill race riots. In Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s 1961 novel about Fleet Street, A Crooked Sixpence, an Englishman says to the (Australian) hero: ‘I don’t know why you wogs come over here if you don’t like the way we do things.’ Wog is often said to be an acronym, of wily (or worthy) oriental gentlemen but there’s no evidence – it’s probably one of those backronyms.
The same is true of the idea that wop is short for ‘without papers (or passport)’. Wops are southern European in general and Italian, in particular. There are three suggestions for the word’s origins: from guappo, Italian for ‘bold, showy’; from guapo, Spanish for a dandy; from vappa, Latin for ‘sour wine, worthless fellow’. Greaseballs are foreigners from the Mediterranean or Latin America. It’s a comment on the perceived oiliness of those cultures, in culinary and social terms.
To the French, the English have been les goddens (Joan of Arc’s view), les rosbifs (the view from the mid twentieth century) and now of course, les fuck-offs. To the English, at least since the mid eighteenth century, the French have been frogs – offensive to the French but acceptable on the other side of the Channel to the point where Marks & Spencer offer a wine called Le Froglet, though perhaps not in their Paris outlet.† Why frogs? The usual explanation is that it derives from a francophone taste for eating amphibian limbs. However, before it referred to the French it was a seventeenth-century English slur at the Dutch – who were then the major enemies and whose low-slung wetland of a country would genuinely have been very froggy. So it’s also possible that when the French took their place as Britain’s favourite enemy, the racial slur moved over with them.
To the English (and Americans), the Germans have been krauts – from their love of sauerkraut, pickledcabbage. The boche, too – from French alboche, a mix of allemand (German) and caboche (head). The Greeks have been bubbles – rhyming slang for bubble and squeak, the ‘full English’ breakfast dish of fried potato and cabbage. The Jews have been four-by-twos – rhyming slang for a standard size of builder’s timber (or a cloth to clean your First World War Lee Enfield rifle). Saucepan lids, too – a rhyme for yids. To inhabitants of the Holloway Road and Finsbury Park areas of London in the late 1950s, the Irish were Turks.
To Americans, the British have, famously, been Limeys since the mid nineteenth century – because Royal Navy sailors drank lime juice to ward off scurvy. To Australians, the British have most commonly been Poms – it’s short for pomegranate, the reference is to the red, sunburned faces of new immigrants. They have also been chooms, a variant of chum (1916), kippers, because that’s what they liked to eat (1905) and Woodbines, because that’s what they liked to smoke (1919).
To Romanies, everyone else is a gadge. (Though they did also give us pal, which means brother in their language.) To others, Romanies are dids or didecoys. To ancient Greeks, the others were barbarians. This was a judgement based on a Greek view of the sound of non-Greek languages – they sounded like baa-baa-baa. Mexicans are making the same judgement when they refer to Americans as gringos – it’s Mexican Spanish for gibberish†. To Basques, Spaniards are maketos and Spain maketonia – from maccus, the Latin for idiot. To Egyptian Arabic-speakers, a crazy person is a Libyan (liibi). To Czechs, a Hungarian is a uher (pimple), an Italian is a makaróni and an Australian is a protinožcí (someone with legs which go opposite ways – it’s a reference to that country being on the reverse side of the world).
To Jews, non-Jews can be yoks – a back formation of the less insulting word for the same thing, goy, ‘with unvoicing of the final consonant’. To South Africans, a black can be a munt – from the Bantu word for a person, umuntu. To the Chinese, white westerners are foreign devils or ghosts while Indians are third children (i.e. third-class) and Koreans are corncobs. It’s a reference to the archaic design of Koreans’ trousers, which – to Chinese eyes – look like, well, like corncobs. The Ulster Protestant slur for Catholics is taig, from Tadhg, the Irish for Timothy. To Dubliners, country people are culchies, apparently derived from Kiltimagh, a town in County Mayo. To Manhattanites, non-residents are bridge-and-tunnellers.
Many, if not most, reference sources will tell you that Buenos Aires is one of those cities that has an irregular name for its inhabitants – los porteños, the people of the port. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Officially, yes, they are porteños but the word’s connotations are far from neutral if it’s being said by a non-metropolitan Argentinian. ‘An internal xenophobia issue,’ Ariel called it. ‘I don’t live in the city itself but outside in the province of Buenos Aires. So I’m what’s called a bonaerense. But if somebody from Córdoba, for example, wanted to insult me, he would probably call me a porteño de mierda.’ A shitty port-person.
The metaphor may change but the reductionism remains the same – the richness and complexity of a whole person or culture rendered down into colour of skin or popular Christian name or taste in food. In linguistics, this is known as dysphemistic metonymy. Dysphemism is the reverse of euphemism and metonymy is using the part to mean the whole – the sails (of the ship) came over the horizon. So now you know what to do next time you disapprove of the cultural attitude in someone’s language. Tell them they’re nothing but a fucking dysphemistic metonymist.
When England played Turkey at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light in 2003, the crowd chanted: ‘I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk.’ There was outrage – not at the Turk-directed racism but at the use of the word ‘Paki’. Yet, a generation ago, even anti-racists would talk about ‘popping down to the paki on the corner’ for a bag of sugar or a packet of cigarettes. Any niggers in any woodpiles have long gone.
Quite simply, pakis are the new cunts. Niggers, too. That’s where the action is in modern swearing. Word power, it seems, is like world power: as one fades so another rises. Once we were a religious society and ‘damn’ was the word that could tear into our social and emotional fabric. As the Enlightenment edged religion aside, so sexuality became the locus of swear-power – fuck starting its rise in the nineteenth century, followed by cunt in the second half of the twentieth. Now it’s the nouns and epithets of group identity that are taking over – race words, mostly, but also ones about religion and class.
Such words are now publicly unacceptable, of course – a trend that has been developing for decades. Chink, coon, dago, guinea, hebe and polack were all left out of the second and third College Edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary. Editor-in-chief Dr David B. Guralnik wrote in its foreword in 1970: ‘It was decided in the selection process that this dictionary could easily dispense with those true obscenities, the terms of racial or ethnic opprobrium that are, in any case, encountered with diminishing frequency these days.’ OED editor Robert Burchfield was, in a quiet, lexicographical way, outraged. Seeing Guralnik’s actions as a simple matter of censorship, he wrote: ‘I want to stress the importance of rejecting Guralnikism, the racial equivalent of Bowdlerism.’ Reject it, Webster’s did. All those words are there, marked as offensive, in the 2002 edition of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
There is, though, another view of the proliferation of such words. It builds on two observations. One, that there are surprisingly few words in the British Isles for our closest neighbours. There are not many Welsh words for the English or Scots words for the Irish, say. The Welsh have been Taffy or Taffs, from the name Dafydd, and the Scots have been Jocks, from the Scottish version of Jack,but there really aren’t a lot of words like that. Rather, our island antipathies emerged with the arrival of foreigners from far and distant places of which we knew little: the nig-nogs of Eddie Booth, the darkies of my genetics lecturer’s explanatory limerick.
Two, that the place and time where you find the greatest abundance of such seemingly racist words is in early-and mid-twentieth-century America – the melting pot years. In The Language of Ethnic Conflict (1983) Irving Lewis Allen says he found a thousand of these words for more than fifty different cultural and national groups in America but he pointed out: ‘The words also show something of the dynamism of ethnic diversity and document the strains of assimilation. In what seems a paradox, the stereotypes generated by the plural society underscore its great diversity.’
Which brings us to the nigger question. To the N-word, to a word with a painful history and a contemporary complex of meanings and associations. To Christopher Darden, a deputy DA at O. J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, it is ‘the dirtiest, filthiest, nastiest word in the English language’. In his detailed, delicate 2003 book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, black American lawyer, academic and writer Randall Kennedy quotes journalist Farai Chideya referring to it as ‘the all-American trump card, the nuclear bomb of racial epithets’. To singer Angie Stone, though, it is an affectionate term – as in ‘What’s up, my nigger?’
More than any other racist word, it carries the freight of emotions and thoughts about our drive to belong. Sexual slang is about where bodies (and our thoughts and feelings about those bodies) meet the world – and other bodies (and their thoughts and feelings about bodies, their own, ours and others). Nigger and words like it are about our sense of self, of belonging, of where we stop and those others begin. So nigger can simultaneously be both completely unacceptably racist and a mark of in-group acceptance and warmth. You stupid nigger vs. you’re my nigger. As a word, it’s now in constant, barely stable oscillation between those two conceptions, between (public) unsayability and (hip-hop) ubiquity. That ceaseless, febrile motion encapsulates all our ambivalence about what it means to belong, posing the painful question: can there be inclusion without exclusion?
Its origins are the same as negro – now also pretty much unacceptable, possibly just because of its similarity to nigger. Both come from Romance language words for black – the Latin niger, the Spanish negro and the middle French nègre. Though it’s often said that it was a slur from the start, the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang disagrees, saying its abusive connotations only arrived over time. As with many words, its spelling took time to settle down. In John Rolfe’s 1619 shipment of slaves to Virginia, he wrote ‘negars’. A 1689 New York document has a ‘niggor’ boy. Dictionarist Noah Webster used ‘negers’. It was only in the early part of the nineteenth century that it definitively became an insult. Hosea Easton was an affluent, educated northern abolitionist. He was also black. In an anti-‘prejudice’ piece of 1837, he wrote that nigger was ‘an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon [blacks] as an inferior race’.
When did it move on from being derogatory to become what the Random House dictionary calls ‘probably the most offensive word in English’? Well, what you might call the counter-nigger movement was well under way by the 1930s when Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick was lobbied hard and successfully to excise the word from the movie – it’s widely used in Margaret Mitchell’s original book. Half a century later, when the British public were surveyed in 1997, they rated nigger as the eleventh worst swear word. Asked again three years later, they rated it the fifth worst.
Wing Commander Guy Gibson led the 1943 raid on the Möhne and Eder dams. He won the Victoria Cross for it. In 1954, a film of his exploits was made, The Dambusters. In life and in the film, Gibson had a black dog called Nigger. Not now he doesn’t. Any time the film is shown on TV, the word is bleeped out. And yet it’s not bleeped in Jackie Brown – a movie made from a book written by an old white guy (Elmore Leonard) and directed by a younger white guy (Quentin Tarantino). Or in the same director’s Pulp Fiction in which a white man says to his black friend (a hit man): ‘storing dead niggers ain’t my fucking business’. Black director Spike Lee took exception to these niggers, though, saying that he – as a black man – had a right to use the word while the white Tarantino didn’t. Ice Cube (rapper, born O’Shea Jackson): ‘When we call each other nigger, it means no harm. But if a white person uses it, it’s something different. It’s a racist word.’
The New York Times cannot even bring itself to print the word ‘nigger’. If its use has to be reported in a story, it is often replaced by the euphemistic circumlocution ‘a derogatory term for African-Americans’. In a 2002 piece about Strom Thurmond’s (indisputably racist) run for the presidency in 1948, ‘nigger’ was replaced by a real antimacassar of a phrase, ‘the less-refined word for black people’. A 2008 article in Newsweek avoided printing it with an even more elaborate periphrasis: ‘a particular racial slur, the one that keeps getting people riled about Huckleberry Finn’.
It was excised from Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary in 1994, after a campaign by Atlanta lawyer Roy Miller. He also asks people to rub it out in dictionaries – Guralnikly, Burchfield would have said. After an address by Miller, in February 2007, the New York city council voted 49–0 on a motion to encourage its electorate to stop using the word. ‘At its worst,’ he said, ‘the N-word is the ultimate form of disrespect against black people. It is a dangerous snake which is liable to bite.’
On his 1997 album Roll with the New black American comic Chris Rock introduced his eight-minute spiel, ‘Niggas vs. Black People’. It separated well-behaved tax-paying black Americans like himself from ‘niggers’ who’d do things like shoot up the screen at the cinema. His 2008 show featured a new line: ‘When I heard they were trying to ban nigger, I went out and bought myself some shares in coon.’ Coon itself is short for raccoon and has been around since 1800.
Counter-clockwise, there’s been what you might call the pro-nigger movement. In his slang dictionary, Green dates its use ‘as a binding, unifying, positive word’ back to the 1940s. That is, as a word that is almost an endearment. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lenny Bruce took up the nigger cause – from a slightly different angle. Dictionary compilers aside, few in history can have put more effort into worrying away at words’ weight, gravity and meaning than Lenny Bruce. He was called a stand-up comic but really he was a word-botherer, an obsessive, sharing his inner madness with the audience. Who can say what Bruce’s inner madness was but its enactment was an obsession about language. He believed, truly believed, that if we all repeated and repeated the word nigger over and over we could wash away its malicious powers. A laundry theory of words. He was convinced that the word’s suppression gave it its power, violence, viciousness. This is how he put it in his act:
If President Kennedy got on television and said, ‘Tonight I’d like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,’ and he yelled ‘nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger’ at every nigger he saw, ‘boogey-boogey-boogey-boogey-boogey-nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger’ till nigger didn’t mean anything any more, till nigger lost its meaning, you’d never make any four-year-old cry about being called nigger when he came home from school.
Comic Dick Gregory’s 1964 autobiography was called Nigger. ‘I told my mama if she hears anybody shout “nigger,” they’re just advertising my book.’ Richard Pryor’s 1984 album was called That Nigger’s Crazy, but then the comic changed his mind about the word, in a hotel lobby in Africa, deciding it was used to ‘describe our own wretchedness and we perpetuate it’. He didn’t use it again.
Others did, though. In 1992, Russell Lawrence Lee, of Ventura County, California, tried to change his name to Mister Nigger, ‘to steal the stinging degradation – the thunder, the wrath, the shame and racial slur – from the word nigger’. The courts turned down his request – on the grounds that it could constitute ‘fighting words’. They turned him down again, in 1996, when he tried to change himself into Mister Radical Aidid Supernigger.
Then there is the nigger-nigga argument. Here the idea is that there is a dichotomy between the two words: the first is a slur, the second a reappropriation. Community activist Tim Robinson was quoted as saying: ‘It was nigger which was the bad word, but you’ve got our people that just went and changed it up a bit.’ So there was NWA – Niggaz with Attitude – and the Tupac Shakur track ‘N.I.G.G.A.’ – Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished. The Angelino rapper whose Black Panther mother named him for an Incan revolutionary also provided a pithy explanation for the difference between the two words: ‘Niggers was the ones on the rope, hanging off the thing; niggas is the ones with gold ropes, hanging out at clubs.’ A point well made but one that can only be made in print, unfortunately. In speech, niggas are still niggers.
