When I was a kid, the word “gip” was extensively. I was an adult before I found out it was short for “gypsy” and was derogatory. When I found out, I stopped using it.
Years ago, I heard an English person use “bint” to describe an obnoxious woman, and I liked the word, so I used it for awhile. It was less harsh than “bitch”, I thought. Then someone pointed out that the word came from Arabic and meant “daughter”, and it was a perjorative term against that race in England. So I stopped using that word.
I’ve always used the word “pollywog” interchangeably with “tadpole”, but my boss said that she thought “pollywog” was related to “golliwog” and was probably a racist term. I haven’t been able to find a connection, but I’ve decided to stop using that word, too.
If you go far enough back, there are words whose derivation is offensive but hardly anyone realizes it. The word “bad” is offensive if you look at its derivation. “Bad” and “good” both have two sources for their positive/comparative/superlative forms. Good/better/better and bad/worse/worst are unlike the forms for most adjectives in English. Long/longer/longest are examples of the typical forms. Good and bad are cases where the forms for two adjectives merged. It’s now thought that “bad” comes from the Old English derogatory term “bæddel”, which was an offensive term.
I think @teelabrown meant that “gyp” was derogatory, not gypsy (but I may be mistaken).
My siblings had a lot of pet names for each other, including “Pud” for my sister. The new kid in town when I was in the sixth grade pointed out that “pud” was short for “pudenda,” which was a reference to external genitalia, usually a woman’s. Didn’t stop me using the term, but I was a bit more careful.
“Gypsy” is another name for the ethnic group that prefers to be called Romani or Rom. “Gypsy” is also used to mean something like free-spirited. It’s hard to tell when someone’s trying to offend someone else because it’s hard to know what definition of a term they are using.
I can say I’ve used the word myself, but I’m familiar with it as a derogatory term for women (not Arabs) from Monty Python: ’ I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!’
.I’ve long thought that “gollywog” derives from “pollywog”, but no place I’ve looked gives a definitive etymology.
“Tadpole” comes from “Tad” ( = “toad”) + “Poll” = (“Head”, as in “poll tax”) – so “Toad Head”, because the tadpole appears to be the head of a baby toad or frog, with an attached tail. It’s actually the entire body of the incipient frog, of course, but it looks like just the head.
Similarly, “pollywog” comes from “Poll(y)” = “head” plus “wog” ( = “wiggle”). It’s a “wiggling head”. , again mistaking the entire body for just the head.
I can’t see any way to work “gollywog” into al of that. I really do think it’s just a nonsense word made up to rhyme with “pollywog”.
However, the “gollywog” character, with its exaggerated minstrel-show features (huge red lips, huge eyes, completely black face) is such an obvious racial caricature that it’s not surprising it’s in disfavor. (Despite Alan Moore’s attempts to “rehabilitate” it in the Black Dossier segment of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) Apparently the Gollywog was a beloved stuffed doll and nursery-book character to many Britons for years, and they didn’t want o give it up. But if you’re just encountering it for the first time as an adult (as I did), it’s pretty hard not to see its origins sand offensiveness.
So you can use “pollywog”. Just don’t use “gollywag”. Or, even worse, “wog” (which doesn’t stand for “westernized oriental gentleman”)
But the thing is, most people aren’t etymologists. If you use the word pollywog, or niggard, some percentage of people will misunderstand, and you look like a jerk.
I also grew up not knowing that “gypped” was a pejorative and that “gypsy” was often considered to be a pejorative (although apparently some Romani don’t consider it to be such). I believe the “free spirit” version is mostly from the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, where the negative connotations dominate in Europe. Being a free spirit fit well into the counter-culture ideology of the Hippie generation.
My mother was born in London and she used to have a golliwog doll. They were just toys to her, but by the 1980s she admitted that they were considered racist by then. As others have said, despite the similarities to the word “pollywog” the two words don’t appear to be related, especially given that (according to dictionary sites) “pollywog” basically comes from Middle English (polwygle) and “golliwog” comes from a book in the late 1800s and refers to a blackface doll, and was spelled “Golliwogg” at the time. “Golliwogg” and “polwygle” aren’t quite as similar as their modern equivalents.
Google’s bullshit generator agrees that “bint” comes from Arabic, but I’ve caught it with so many errors that I never believe anything it says. However, poking around on dictionary sites, it does appear that the word was borrowed from Arabic. Wiktionary says that the word was slang picked up by British soldiers during their occupation of Egypt and was used to mean “girlfriend” or “girl on the side”. It’s probably more slang than racist, but either way it’s not a terribly polite word.
When I was young it was obvious that (n-word)-rigged was horribly racist, but a lot of folks used “Jerry-rigged” as the non-offensive version. It was only much later that I learned that “Jerry” in this case referred to Germans, and that the phrase was a pejorative against German folk.
I whish it was that easy. The gypsies were called gypsies in the 15th century because it was thought that they originated from Egypt, when in reality they came from India. From Egypt they seem to have divided into two main groups, one that went to Western Europe along the Danube, another that went to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The first group subdivided repeatedly.
After the genocide in WWII the German term Zigeuner was changed for Romani or Romanes in the First World Romani Congress (which at the time was named differently) in 1971: you see it took a while. As most of the Gypsies in Germany are from the Sinti subgroup the right term was finally agreed to be “Sinti und Roma” in German.
But the Southern Gypsies call themselves gitanos in Spain are are not part of the Sinti or the Roma subgroups. Calling them so would be erroneous. There are numerous denominations in use for the Romani subgroups: here is a wikilist. I can tell you that translating the terms Sinti, Roma, Rom, Romaní, gitano, zíngaro and several others is fraught with minefields.
Sometimes it is evident. Sometimes there is more or less plausible deniability.
I learned on this board not so long ago that the terms Oriental and Asian are better avoided. I found the explanation unconvincing, but language is seldom logical.
True; also some others know the difference, but will insist that you’re using the term to be coyly provocative, when you’re not.
Denigrate is a word that sometimes gets this treatment; it does derive from the latin ‘to make black’, but this does not appear to have the slightest racial implication - it just means to devalue something as if by staining it.
Similarly in Fawlty Towers, Basil calls Polly a “cloth-eared bint” (cloth-eared meaning deaf, I think.) Polly is very white and there’s no racial connotation.
“Pud,” yeah I’ve heard the term meaning dick, but surely it’s also a shortened form of the very standard affectionate term “pudding” (or puddin’)? (ETA: what Mangetout said)