"Wop" in 1908?

[Douglas G. Wilson]

 From LOC site:

----------

_The Sun_ (New York NY), 26 Aug. 1907: p. 5:

<< [title] BATTLE OF THE SEWER PIPES / THE WOPS AND THE YIDS WAGE WAR IN
JAMES STREET / It All Began When the Giannini Dog Tackled the
Lichtenstein Cat .... / The armed truce which had bridged hostilities
between the Oak street Wops and the Madison street Yids ....>>

[Here I see additionally 4 instances of "Wop dog" and 8 instances of
"the Wops", along with <<Out came a Yid and a Wop, interlocked.>>]

----------

_The Evening World_ (New York NY), 25 June 1907 (Final Results Ed.): p. 12:

[boxing] <<At the Brown A. A. on West Twenty-third street, Joe
Bernstein, the champion of the Ghetto, will tackle Frankie Paul, the Wop
champion, in a six-round go.>>

----------

[maybe a different sense]

_The Evening World_ (New York NY), 13 Apr. 1907 (Final Results Ed.): p.
8(?):

<<"There's plenty of peasants these days, kids. Only we call them
muckers and wops. ....">>

----------

_The Sun_ (New York NY), 18 Nov. 1906: sec. 2, p. 16:

<<There was a time, not very long ago, when you couldn't find a Wop --
that means an Italian in the latest downtown dialect -- in Danny's
resort even by using a microscope. But to-day it's different. The
members of the Five Points gang, all dark skinned sons of Sicily, grew
tired of flitting from place to place, with no set rendezvous for their
nightly gatherings. A number of the Pointers used to frequent the place,
and it wasn't long before the entire gang became regulars.>>

----------

_The Sun_ (New York NY), 16 Feb. 1906: p. 3:

[arrests in a larceny] <<Besides Lyons and Murphy, he says, there were
in it Albert Moquin ... and one whom Lyons calls "Oscar the Wop," or
"Oscar the Dago.">>

----------

It's hard to search for such a short word because most of the 'hits' are
OCR errors.

-- Doug Wilson

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org