Vancouver Canucks, New York Yankees, Washington Redskins

[D. Ezra Johnson]

I shouldn't have sounded so skeptical about the "kanaka" story. I was just
hoping someone would contribute some of the evidence for such a hypothesis.
By the way, the dictionary didn't say it came into English through a French
form "canaque". Without that piece of information, I was having trouble
understanding just who in the Pacific Northwest was calling French fur
traders by the Hawaiian word for 'person', and why. If the word comes
through French, as Jim Rader implies, then it's more like the French fur
traders got friendly with the Pacific Islander fur traders, and picked up
the word as slang...

But does anyone know if "Canaque" has (or ever had) currency in Canadian
French?

Maybe it is like "Yankee" in that it's generally non-offensive, there is a
sports team with the name, but at certain times and as used by certain other
groups, it is or has been a term of disparagement.

DEJ


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