[Ads-l] The NY Times prints "nigger" ...

[Jonathan Lighter]

1. A stupid or worthless person. Obs.

1908 Kenneth McGaffey _The Sorrows of a Show Girl_ (Chicago: J. I. Austen)
17: Some old pappy guy out in Chi....  I don't know who or what this old
wop is that made this crack.

2. An Italian.

1912 Rex Beach _The Net_  (N.Y.: Harper) 154: Do you see that...wop next to
Cesar Maruffi?

1913 _Saturday Eve. Post_ (March 25) 10: He had eaten...a banana snatched
from the stand of a somnolent "wop."

[Etc.]

(Also, any person of Southern or Central European descent; the Italian
language.)

JL

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 5:16 PM, Joel Berson <berson at att.net> wrote:

> and "wetback" and "chink" also.  Today, in "A [Racially ] Charged Title. A
> Canceled Show. Now a Cal State Official Resigns."  [Bracketed "Racially" on
> paper, but not in electrons.]  By Andrew R. Chow.  Page C5/1 in New England
> edition.
>
> "Michele Roberge, the director of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at
> California State University, Long Beach, resigned last week after the
> university told her to cancel a campus performance of a racially charged
> show."
>
> "The play, “N*W*C,” whose full title is three racial slurs, stars three
> actors of African-American, Asian and Latino descent [not in that order!]
> as they reflect on their conflicted experience with race in America. The
> slurs are used in an attempt to deflate them, according to a 2007 New York
> Times interview with the show’s creators. The performance was scheduled for
> Sept. 29."...
>
> "The play, written by Allan Axibal, Rafael Agustín and Miles Gregley, had
> its debut in 2007. The three authors have been performing it steadily on
> campuses across the country, including a sold-out performance on the Long
> Beach campus last year. While the title of the show (the initials stand for
> 'nigger,' 'wetback' and 'chink') was initially criticized by the Long Beach
> branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Ms. Roberge said there were no live protests
> before or after the performance."
>
> (A more racially-offensive W than "wetback" would have been "wop,"
> although I suppose that might have required dating the play 100 years
> earlier.  As a side note, however, the OED dates "wop" to 1919 and
> "wetback" to only 10 years later -- the latter perhaps an outlier, since
> the next quotation is 1972.)
>
> Joel
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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