My boyfriend, who is from a rural area of Tennessee, grew up hearing wasps called “waspers.” Despite having grown up in Tennessee myself, I have never heard of this. What say you, dopers? If you have heard it, I would be interested in knowing where.
Poll to follow.
Nope, never heard it. Schoolboys call them ‘Jaspers’ here in the UK, at least they did where and when I went to school.
Wasps are wasps.
Hornets are hornets.
Dirt daubers are daubers.
Yup, and Yellow Jacket are [del]little bastards[/del] Yellow Jackets.
I stepped in a hidden ground nest when I was a kid. 45-50 stings up my legs. About a month later one got down the back of my shirt and I then sat back in the car and he stung me 3-4 times.
I assume you’re talking about wasps, the stinging insects, not WASPs, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Either way, though, nope, never heard ‘waspers.’
Never heard of ‘wasper’ either, though it occurs to me that it might be a holdover of the Oxford -er, that nineteenth-century slang formation that gave us “soccer” for “Association football”.
I never heard of the “Oxford-er” before, but reading Sunspace’s link, my eye was caught by this:
So “Harry Potter” has the form of an Embellished Oxford “er”
I grew up in northern Illinois, where we had wasps. As an adult, I’ve encountered quite a few waspers in northern Arkansas, and perhaps in some other places in the South as well.
I was confused too, until like you I realized that neither are ever called waspers so it doesn’t matter which the OP means.
If you’re talking about the term for people, I notice mostly uneducated people tend to use a term other than WASP.
Bugs (wasps) not people (WASPs). Spoken they are confusing, but the caps give the acronym away.
I’ve heard it from the very, very backwoodsy people, usually a couple generations removed from my own. And, even then, I always got the idea that they knew they were adding something to the word, as it was only used with a negative connotation.
Aay chance there’s areas with high non-English influence? Wasper sounds awful close to Italian “vespa”, for example
I am a young woman from backwoods Tennessee myself. The term wasper is commonly used in this area of the country. The backwoods Tennessee (and surrounding areas) dialect is more closely related to elizabethton(may be spelt incorrectly) English than any other dialect spoken in the United States today. My best educated guess is that it is a carry over from that era or a simple bastardization that came late.
I have already returned with more studies. ‘Wasper’ could easily be a term used as a term for a person who kills them. It would just make sense to call someone a “wasper” if they eradicated them from areas as an occupation.
I present another theory. Tennessee not only had a high English immigration rate, it was home to many Germans also. The German word for wasp is wespe, and the settlers are known to bastardize German words (e.g Pennsylvania Dutch is not Dutch, but said they were from Deutschland) It is imaginable that ‘wespe’ could have been bastardized and pronounced as wasper. It easily could have stayed in the southern vernacular.
I wondered that myself, and I wondered if the evening church service Vespers would sound waspy to some folks.
Wait, are we talking about Episcopalians or Yellow Jackets?
But no, I’ve never heard of “Waspers.”
Maybe an old thread but both the term and it were new to me.
Yellow Jackets, of course.
Episcopalians can get their own cans of soda.
Ours are more a coffee and cigarette crowd. And the Espicopalians as well. 