When I was young we used the derogatory expression WOPS to describe Italians.
Is it true that WOP is derived from “without papers”? If so, why does this apply only to Italians? Why is it derogatory? Why has it lost its flavour and is not heard much anymore? What does “without papers” mean anyway?
No. Like many acronymic etymologies floating around, this one seems to be bogus.
That is almost surely not the derivation of “wop”, making your other questions moot. “Wop” is most likely derived from the Spanish word “guapo”, pronounced “whoppo”. One theory is that the Spanish called Italians “guapos” and the word spread from Spain, not from Italy, nor was it coined in the US.
Read Wop: Origin of a racial slur for a discussion that parallels what I wrote above.
Because we prefer to be called dagos.
I don’t think I’ve been to a family wedding in the last decade without someone referring to my cousins and I with “You all look like a bunch of dagos!”
But we’re not guidos dammit. There’s no fake tans or overly washboarded abs among us. But we would have fit right in on the set of The Sopranos.
Damn, I’m sorry you corrected that from the Godfather. I was gonna ask to meet whichever one of you could have fit in for the young Diane Keaton. 
Ethnic slurs are like chewing gum. After a while you have to spit it out and get a brand new wad to chomp down on and taste that sweet, sweet racist juice.
Yup. That’s my theory, too. At one time, Spanish soldiers occupied Southern Italy & Sicily. Perhaps they called each other *guapo *(“handsome”) as modern guys might call each other “dude.” Given the similarity of the languages, Italian guys picked up the habit.
It’s one of those words that evolved into an ethnic slur after non-Italians picked it up to describe “them furriners.”
It’s theorized that the word mafia has a similar origin. One common theory is that the word derives from mafiusu, a Sicilian term that describes boldness but also has connotations of flashiness.
It may have been that the Spanish soldiers considered themselves “real men” as opposed to the local Italian “pretty boys” strutting around in their fancy clothes.
Yes, WOP, diego, hunkie, gook, chink, frog, kraut, spic, kike, poluk, etc. are gone in these politically correct times.
I love that most of these are misspelled.
Looked to me like he got 7/10 right, spelling-wise.
This is awesome. I kind of almost want to put it as my sig; only I like my current sig too much still.
Both guapo and chulo (which can mean a certain kind of street flashiness/dandiness, iow, “pimp” in all its meanings that I know of) are or used to be used like that, with their usage varying by location and time period. Actually, both are even said with the exact same intonation, when used like that nowadays in Spain… with a sort of pause in the middle and a very-elongated second syllable (gua! pooooo, chu! looooooo).
goes off singing “Pi-chi… es el chu-lo que cas-ti-ga…” from the Zarzuela “Las Leandras”
From the cite given by Gus Gusterson that’s too good not to quote:
6/10, wop doesn’t require capitalization.
And I didn’t mean anything bad by it, more that slurs are falling out of favor and people can’t remember how they’re actually supposed to be spelled.
The standard rule is that nearly all etymologies that claim to show that an English word comes from an acronym are wrong if the supposed acronym was coined before World War I. This business turning of acronyms into words didn’t really get started until World War I (and didn’t really get into high gear until World War II). The word “wop” is recorded as appearing just before World War I. There are a couple of counterexamples to this, but it’s best just to learn this rule and ignore all acronymic etymology as being nonsense.
Are there standard spellings for them?
The spellings that I’ve always seen are wop (not capitalized), dago, honkie or honky, gook, chink, frog, kraut, spic or spick, kike, and pollak or pollock.
Hunkie might actually have been correctly intended if it was employed against Eastern Europeans, (hunky/hunkie variants).
In Southeast Michigan, with its very large Polish immigrant community, the slur is generally spelled Polack, (hey! it was good enough for Shakespeare).
(Pollock is the fish.)
While we’re at it, where does the similarly derogatory term “guinea” (sp?) come from?
After coming from Italy, much of my family settled in the boroughs of NYC. My uncle used to refer to the Brooklyn Bridge as the “Guinea Gangplank”.