Many years ago I used to refer to insensitive boors as “slack-jawed cretins.” I didn’t realize that the word cretin was also used to describe someone with a congenital abnormality. To compare someone with such churlish behavior to anyone with cretinism was not only a poor analogy, but also an insult to the cretin.
It can depend who is using it, and how they are using it. As a racial classification, to be very precise there is no alternative that is as good. “Black” doesn’t work, in that as Americans use it they would call Australian aboriginals with the same term. “African” definitely doesn’t work, as there are African Arabs that aren’t “black”. “African-American” is generally understood to refer to a black person; if they were an Arab from Africa nobody would ordinarily call them that. However, I happen to know a lot of black African nationals in the US. They certainly aren’t Americans now, or ever desire to be so. Thus, if I happen to know of a very dark skinned person who I am aware is not of Australian ancestry, but don’t know their citizenship beyond that, “negro” is the only available term.
Ditto on Jap. I just thought it was short for Japanese.
Yeah, but somehow “Scottish Whisky” is just plain wrong!
tom. While one of the earliest cites(1767 OED) mentions Georgia, the next cite in OED is from Maryland(1784). I wouldn’t put too much stock in the Georgia/Florida origin of the term in the US. The early cites are just too skimpy.
And, as you said, the “braggart” origin is almost certainly correct.
dubious :dubious:
dubious :dubious:
It carries with it a lot of sterotypes and colonial baggage - when the Orient was some far-away exotic land of an almost mythological nature.
You are joking, right? You do realise that exluding Australian aboriginals doesn’t exactly leave you with a single homogenous black race?
We Japs don’t mind, but our “friends” do.
Most Orientals don’t care, but the term is quaint and implies from the East.
But since we Americans look at a map ftom a Pacific point of view, Asian is to the west.
Please don’t. The one about picnic has already done enough damage.
A “very dark skinned person” who is not of aboriginal Australian ancestry might be an Andaman Islander, a Fijian, an Ati from the Philipines, a person from the southern tip of India, or someone else entirely of whom the word “Negro” would be utterly incorrect. The word “Negro” was used (rather sloppily) to refer to a member of several rather disparate groups whose more recent origins were in Africa (and who were not that closely related).
In the U.S., Negro usually refers to exactly the same part of the population who are identified by the terms black and African American. While not pejorative, an overwhelming majority of the group so idenitified decided, in the late 1960s, that they preferred the term black. (Various minorities of people within that group continued to prefer Negro or preferred Afro-American or African-American. The last of those terms came to be accepted by a certain percentage of the news media after Jesse Jackson announced, in the late 1980s, that a focus group of which he was a member preferred that term as bearing the most similarity to the terms Irish-American, Polish-American, Italian-American and similar phrases of ethnic identity commonly used in the Rust Belt cities where many blacks now live. There is nothing wrong with the term “Negro,” but it is not preferred by the majority of people whom it identifies and it only identifies a single group for whom there are other preferred terms available.)
Not as an American origin, (since the term is already extant in British vernacular long before), but I suspect that the association of the phrase “Georgia cracker” is not merely an historical accident. I’ve never heard of a “(Chesapeake) Bay cracker” while “Georgia cracker” has widespread currency. I’m not going to claim anything like certainty on the point, but my suspicions lean in the direction I noted.
Interesting side-point: I’ve been doing some unrelated reading about the 1919 race riots in England. It looks like ‘negro’ was the commonly-used term, eg in newspaper reports, and that ‘nigger’ was the common slur (such as the attacks on ‘nigger-town’ in Cardiff). Anybody know the pre-20th century history of these words?
A paleoanthropologist friend of mine got a little miffed once when I used the word “troglodytes” to refer to people I considered stupid, backward, and barbaric. Apparently “troglodyte” is still used in its primary sense of “cave-dweller” as a technical term referring to certain prehistoric peoples, whom we should not wantonly slander by lumping them together with folks like Jimmy Swaggart. 
Like “Neanderthal”, though, this is one you probably don’t need to be PC about except in the company of paleoanthropologists.
And, of course, you wouldn’t want to offend the humble wren.
Re Scotch Tape
“Indian giver” and “Indian summer.” The idea of Indians giving something and then taking it away when actually it was the other way around.
Apparently in Germany some businesses use the term ‘Scottish Prices’ in their advertising to indicate that their goods or services are cheap.
According to the newspaper reports on the practice here, nobody there seems to think this is derogatory at all…
Indian Summer is a slur? Growing up in Wyoming and the Dakotas I always thought of Indian Summer as being a good thing. Shoot, this morning my local channel’s weather man described the warm weather for the next week as an Indian Summer and then talked about it with the co-anchor. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard it on the news. Their, the channel’s, broadcast range covers most of east river so it includes 5 reservations and at least parts of 2 others, if there was a chance of someone taking umbrage I don’t think it would be broadcasted as often as it is during the fall. I see your location is New Jersey, so maybe eastern tribes see it different.
I think the original connotation, as in “Indian giver,” is that it is a false or deceptive summer. Warm weather in autumn, although pleasant, is misleading since cold weather is close behind.