I know this wasn’t directed at me, but FWIW I live in Aus and the answer is Yes, I’ve never heard it used to refer to a black person.
I have heard it used to describe someone with fuzzy hair, afro style, but in each instance this person was not black.
Did I claim that?
Or did I say something like “I’d be happy to be educated otherwise?”
Yes, I believe that’s true. The racist term of choice when I was at school was ‘Nignog’. I don’t remember using it myself.
Yeah that’s right; straight after you declared “It just didn’t really happen here [in England]”.
It’s worth noting that (again, in my experience) these toys were just called ‘Golly’ - which was the name of the Robertsons marmalade mascot.
You cannot ***honestly ***sum up the quote below as 'my anecdote counts as relevant, while conflicting ones do not."
I get that you live in England. Do you get that you’re a white man who lives in England and (through no fault of your own) you’re less sensitive to racial issues than non-white people? What do think of casdave’s posts earlier in this thread (below, bolding mine)?
Fair point - and I accept it.
I do wonder though, what represents a fair and reasonable cultural boundary between places where this happened and places where it apparently did not, and whether the described activity permeated all parts and subcultures of the UK, or was limited in spread.
Or maybe it was going on all around me and I was just insulated from it somehow. It’s possible.
Yes. Again, have you been reading this thread? Because casdave’s posts were talking about the UK. I believe Mijin’s were as well, although looking back now I don’t see that this was specified. The newspaper quote I provided was also from the UK.
I doubt anyone has been talking about golliwogs in the United States, as they’re almost entirely unknown here. The Jim Crow Museum website describes golliwogs as “the least known of the major anti-black caricatures in the United States”. I also asked my mother (who was born in the 1950s) about this when I saw her the other day and she’d never heard the term “golliwog” before.
Are you really?
People could think that regardless of which came first. But if you consider the Upton quote solid evidence that “wog” predates “golliwog” then I suggest you write to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary and tell them so, as they have no examples of “wog” being used prior to the 1920s.
To clarify, we’ve certainly have had dolls in the form of various racist caricatures of black people in the US, it’s the term “golliwog” that’s little-known here.* I think most American adults would identify a golliwog as a depiction of a blackface minstrel. This “Top 10 Dubious Toys” piece on the Time magazine website explains that a golliwog is a “blackface minstrel-like character” once popular in England, and Upton’s golliwog character was apparently inspired by a minstrel doll she’d owned.
*It’s been mentioned in this thread already that CCR briefly used the name “The Golliwogs”, but I seem to remember hearing that this name was chosen specifically because it sounded British. The band’s Wikipedia article makes this claim but it isn’t cited.
I found a more complete version of the “fearsome etymology” quote from Florence Upton in the 1992 biography A Lark Ascends by Norma Davis. It can be previewed on Google Books, but here’s the relevant portion:
If Upton was familiar with the use of the term “wog” as an insult, she doesn’t mention it here. I don’t see a date given for this quote but Upton died in 1922, several years before the first print use of the term “wog” cited by the OED. It had presumably been used in speech before then, and “wogger” is cited as having been used by Joyce in Ulysses while Upton was still alive, so it is possible that she had heard of this. However, her “fearsome etymology” doesn’t seem to be in reference to any alleged racist etymology at all. In context it looks to me like she was just joking about how she’d been accused of not using proper English.
The passage I’ve quoted is followed by an ellipses in A Lark Ascends and then continues with Upton’s description of how she came up with the name “Golliwogg”, so it could be that some reference to racist use of the term “wog” was omitted by Davis. That doesn’t seem very likely to me, though. On the very same page (11) Davis writes “Unfortunately the popularity of the [golliwog] dolls in England has led to the name being shortened to ‘wog’ as a derogatory name for immigrants from Africa and India.” Since the OED isn’t certain of the etymology of “wog” I’m not inclined to take Davis’s word for it that it really did originate as a shortening of “golliwog”, but an Upton biographer presumably wouldn’t have made such a claim if she had a quote from Upton herself indicating that “wog” actually predated “golliwog”.
OK, until Enginerd pointed it out, I had somehow entirely missed casdave’s post. My fault, and I can see now how my having missed it made it look as if I might be deliberately ignoring other people’s anecdotes. My bad. I’m sorry.
I really am, despite how it may look. What may look like tenacity in clinging to the notion that these things were never more than innocent objects is really probably an expression of my sincere surprise at what I’m being told here.
Good point - actually, as Upton is quoted later in her life, it’s entirely possible for her to be dismayed at the association, even if there is a causal link. In any case, the OED would not consider the quote as a prior reference.
I’m also UK born and raised and I definitely heard the term wog used as an insult for black people when I was a kid - and it was specifically for black people, not people of south-east asian descent, who had their own pejorative terms. On TV, for example, Jim Davidson used it until he was forced not to.
Sometimes my experiences seem to differ from some others on here who also grew up in the uk, and at least some of those times I think it’s because I grew up in a solidly working-class place; perhaps those who grew up in middle-class areas never heard the term. Not that middle-class people are less likely to be racist, just that they’re more likely to tiptoe around expressing that verbally.
Whether wog comes from golliwog or not, I’m fairly sure that was the connection people were making when they used the word wog, at least in the seventies and eighties.
I heard that term quite a lot - but in my experience, it just wasn’t linked to the name of the marmalade mascot (perhaps in part because he was just ‘Golly’).
I think there was less racial integration in the middle class in the 70s/80s. That might be a contributing factor (although my background isn’t really middle class - my parents were up-and-coming, but still working class)
That would have been entirely possible, and still would be, depending on where he lived.
There are villages in England where narry a black person has been seen.
I have always understood that “wog” referred to “westernised oriental gentleman”, and was used for the educated Indians in British India. However, in Australia it refers to those of Mediterranean origin.
That wouldn’t stop people from disparaging people they don’t actually come into physical contact with.
I’m pretty sure that, whatever the origins of wog are, they’re not an acronym - they almost never are. And the term in the UK within my lifetime (I’m 37) has definitely mostly been applied to people of African and Afro-Caribbean descent.
Yes, I’ve heard a similar thing about WOG, Worthy Oriental Gentleman. I was told it came to use back when England had many colonies in Asia. In many places the people were subjugated and there were accompanying slurs for the locals. But in places where the people were not subjugated, (think Siam), that wouldn’t do, so WOG came to be. Even when I was told this I was unsure of it’s veracity, though the teller seemed most sincere indeed.
(Spectre of Pithecanthropus wrote: “I’ve heard the term “wog” used as an ethnic term by clueless older characters in UK productions, e.g. the Major in Fawlty Towers…”)
QUOTE=sidecar_jon;16401622]Oddly though i think i’m right in saying that The Major uses the term “Wog” to differentiate West indians from Indians. I think it went thus. On taking a lady to a cricket match.
“odd girl, she said she didnt want to watch the niers… i said no no no these are not niers these men are wogs!”
[/QUOTE]
Off at a bit of a tangent here, from golliwogs: but George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman” novels are, for me, irresistibly brought to mind. Harry Flashman, the central figure, revels in being totally obnoxious; while he despises most of his fellow-humans regardless of colour or race, he nonetheless rarely misses the chance to use an opprobrious epithet for a particular section of mankind. It would seem that according to Flashman, everyone on earth who is not white, Oriental, or Native American: is classified as a ni**er – this including all the denizens of Asia west from India and Kazakhstan, to Turkey. With the novels mostly taking place in the mid-19th century, this was likely before the word “wog” was, at any rate, widely known.
(Though Fraser was no liberal, the drift is got, that he does not actually approve of his anti-hero’s worst excesses – it’s just that if Flashman had been aware of the term or concept “political correctness”, he would have thought it ludicrous, and gone to considerable lengths to flout it; and the guy’s general monstrousness is part of what he is, and makes for fine stories.)
They always are, but acronym-based etymologies are always false for words arising before the 20th century, and many/most of those that come later too.