[Lexicog] "God bless his cotton-picking soul"

[Rottet, Kevin J]

According to the Webster's New Universal Unabridged, cotton-pickin' (sic) just means "damned, confounded." They give the example "That's a cotton-pickin' lie." It gives the usage label "slang" but there is certainly no suggestion of racism in their presentation. I could believe that there may have been racist connotations to this word at some earlier time, but at least according to my intuitions as a native speaker of American English, there isn't the remotest hint of racism associated with it now. I agree with Bill's perception that this word suggests tediousness of detail (although even that meaning has largely been bleached, for me and apparently for the dictionary I quoted, since it's now really just a mild expletive like "darned").

Kevin


	-----Original Message-----
	From: William J Poser [mailto:billposer at alum.mit.edu]
	Sent: Wed 2/23/2005 6:12 PM
	To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
	Cc:
	Subject: [Lexicog] "God bless his cotton-picking soul"
	
	



	To me "God bless his cotton-picking soul" means
	"Even though he is obsessed with tedious detail, God bless him",
	often with the connotation "It's unpleasant, tedious work; thank
	goodness that he does it so the rest of us don't have to.".
	
	Bill
	--
	Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
	http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu
	
	
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