It’s a phrase I’ve taken out of my vocabulary, because of its racial overtones. It’s similar, but milder than, “gyp”: most folks who use “gyp” are completely unfamiliar with its racial origins, so I don’t think less of someone for using the word, but if they learn its meaning and get super defensive, then I think a bit less of them.
“Cotton-pickin” seems to me to refer to lower-class Southern folks, and there’s a real good chance it’s referring to black Southern folks, given our history down here. Whether it’s got a racial or a class-based origin as an insult, I don’t see a need to use it.
“Grubby little” replaces it in like 99% of cases*: as in, “Get your grubby little hands out of the cookie batter, you little monster!”
Here’s where some super clever person comes along and thinks they’re gonna satirize me by making a claim that “grubby little” is offensive. I’m ready to laugh uproariously at your wit!
I was told, as a little kid in Rochester, NY in the early 1960s, that the term was racist and offensive - just as I was taught I should say “catch a tiger by the toe,” and not “catch a n****r by the toe.”
Having said that, I would not ascribe a racist ideology to anyone just because they used the term. Even before I read this thread, I would assume that the term is now sufficiently outdated and infrequently used that someone might say it without having any idea that it was a no-no.
It seems to me that it is an easy enough term to avoid. Other than emphasis - sort of like “keep your gosh darn hands off of my pie!” - what meaning does it add to any sentence? None that I can pinpoint. So it should be easy enough to live without it. I’d feel differently if it filled an otherwise empty semantic niche and is now widely considered inoffensive, despite what I was taught as a kid.
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This is sort of what I came in here to say. It is very classist, especially as it became popular in the early 20th century.
If you were poor enough to have to pick cotton, it made your hands very rough, and therefore you shouldn’t be touching anything fine, especially fine fabrics, as your hands would snag and pick delicate linens and things. Hence, “Get your cotton pickin’ hands off that!” Tailors and dressmakers would never pick cotton, or anything else that would ruin their hands.
Quick aside: My ex-mother-in-law, who is now in her 70s, told me of having to pick cotton to earn enough money to buy her first bra. She grew up a sharecropper’s daughter in South Georgia and was treated very badly by other kids at school because she was so poor. The woman has major unresolved self-esteem issues to this day, which unfortunately she transferred many of those to her son, which played a role in the demise of our marriage. Oh, she is white.
As for my personal experience with this phrase, in the 60s and 70s when I was very little and in adolescence, I would get told to “get my cotton pickin’ hands” off something I shouldn’t be touching. It was mostly understood to my age group as insinuating your hands were grubby or grimy.
Being out of “your cotton pickin’ mind” is also an insinuation that you are out of your league, out of your place, and therefore don’t know what you are talking about. Just another way of saying you are crazy, but nothing to do with race.
I likewise never thought of it as such, but can see how it would be. It’s not a phrase I use often, but it just has cadence that can be quite nice in certain circumstances. However, it has so little meaning when I say it that I don’t see any reason that can’t be replaced.
The first thing that comes to mind is “stupid little,” but, not being a fixed phrase, it kinda sounds more insulting to my ears. One that is a fixed phrase would be “dadblamed,” but that doesn’t have the rhythm. But it does have that old-timey feel, so I might use that.
Anything referencing picking cotton is going to have racial overtones, regardless of the fact that white people picked cotton. All this history diving misses the point.
I always think of this phrase as Eli Whitney’s last words: “Get your cotton-picking hands off my gin!”
But why is it that every single word used to describe certain non-white people, or that could conceivably be applied to them, never mind that it’s also applied to other people, eventually degrades and becomes some kind of a slur? Or viewed by some as a kind of slur?
When I played with the neighborhood kids when visiting my grandmother in Oklahoma they had a phrase they used, something to the effect of “last one in is a nigger tar baby!” I asked my grandmother what that meant. She told me it doesn’t mean anything, but that one word was used as a bad way to describe colored people and the better word was Negroes, but that wasn’t actually what the kids meant. (I still don’t know what a tar baby is, really. I assume it originally meant something.)
Anyway–now the polite words are considered slurs. And words that meant other things are considered racial slurs. “Cotton-picking” is just a thing. You might as well say “dad-gummed.” “Thugs” come in all colors.
Slightly off topic: I had heard “a coon’s age.” What my grandmother said, and I have never heard anyone outside our family use it, was “an owl’s age.” It seemed to be somewhat longer than a month of Sundays.
It’s useful in this sort of discussion to have some historic background of facts. From the OED:
slang (orig. south. U.S.). A general term of disapproval or abuse, = ‘damned’.
1958 Post (N.Y.) 1 June M3 I don’t think it’s anybody’s cotton-pickin’ business what you’re doing.
1968 J. Philips Hot Summer Killing (1969) iii. iii. 161 You have to be a hero or out of your cotton-picking mind.
1970 M. Kenyon 100,000 Welcomes xvii. 142 Damn Mickey McQuaid for ever bringing me to this pixilated, cotton-pickin’ country.
Doesn’t look like a racist origin at all, past the time when sharecropping was widely thought of, and not originally found in the South. Just a euphemism, after all. Though I think more likely based on mther-fcking than ‘damned’
Also a white southerner, and the first generation of my family in an unknown length of time that is over 100 years that hasn’t been a cotton-picker. My grandmother was literally a share-cropper’s daughter. But some idiotsare offended by the very existance of cotton.
Yes, it comes from the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris. One of the other animals, maybe Brer Fox, I think, makes up a fake figure out of tar, dresses it up in a hat and such, in order to fool Brer Rabbit, with whom he has a constant beef. He sets the tar figure out at the cross roads, knowing Brer Rabbit will want to talk to it, and when it doesn’t speak back, Brer Rabbit gets mad at the rudeness of this feller not being polite enough to speak. So Brer Rabbit wallops it and gets stuck to it, and the rest of the story is pretty hilarious.
In my mind, the tar baby was just a figure like a scarecrow, and the only reason it is black is because tar is black, and it was constructed of tar to be sticky.
To tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s racist at all. I never heard that it was until recently.
I think the actual raison d’etre behind the phrase has nothing to do with black slaves harvesting cotton. It’s really a euphemism that has the same cadence as “mother-fuckin’”. as such, it it belongs in the class of euphemisms that are close in sound and “feel” to the original to let the user get away with an almost-swear, like
Gosh darned
Gol Durned
(Great) Ceasar’s Ghost
Cheese on Rice
Judas Priest
Fricken
frigging
shoot
So I think the phrase was conceived and started simply on the basis of assonance and syllabic stress. That “cotton picking” might suggest “black” was a secondary consideration that probably gave the phrase added insult value in the minds of racist users, which might’ve helped the phrase survive and thrive in the Darwinian struggle of maledictions. But that doesn’t mean that everyone wjho used it was racist, or that most people ever even stopped to consider the possibly implications of the term.
Like many others, I grew up hearing it in old cartoons and humorous scenes in movies. I always saw it as just another euphemism.
It’s not a term I use or hear IRL, only because it’s outdated and we’re all more comfortable using stronger language when it’s called for. If I did hear someone use the term, it would never indicate to me that they are a bigot, nor do I think the sportscaster in question meant anything by it. That being said, I’m surprised that anyone here, of all places, is surprised that it has racist origins and in today’s climate it’s pretty easy to see how someone who is sensitive to these kinds of things would jump all over it.
By the way, does “pea pickin’” have the same origins / baggage? Because I like using that one.
Not racist. My mother grew up in rural Arkansas and was a cotton picker from time to time. She’s extremely white (and mind-bogglingly racist for that matter). Cotton-picking isn’t the sole domain of a particular race. If you want “cotton-pickin’” to mean something, it would have to do with an ability to endure back-breaking, finger-lacerating, heatstroke-inducing labor. I myself am no cotton picker for the sole fact that I am a colossal wuss.
The racism doesn’t disappear because a term is applied to a white person. In fact, there’s where the racism kicks in. You’re supposedly insulting a white person by describing them in terms that would normally be associated with a black person.
What doesn’t exist can’t disappear. Mom had an impressive lost of verbs and adjectives specific to Blacks, I recall no instances involving cotton. If it was a thing during her childhood (1942-1957) I’m pretty sure it would have come up. Thoroughly unvetted but reasoned random-assed cite. Consider: Cotton-picker = pejorative; cotton-picking = “unpleasant”
