WASP (Chicago Tribune, May 1957)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

COMPLETELY OFF TOPIC:

Still no phone service. This is from a Kinko's. I'll write it off as an expense against my non-existent earnings.

WHERE DID BARRY POPIK EAT?--La Giara, on Third Avenue just south of East 34th Street. A $19.95 prix fixe. About average.

--------------------------------------------------------------
WASP

The Chicago Tribune digitization is now almost half-way through 1957.


5 May 1957, CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE, pg. 1:
_A Trip to Appalachia:_
_Visit to Middle Ages_

(...)

Here are people--not the entire 8 million, but enough to make a difference--who preach salvation thru snake handling, who believe neither in evolution nor education, who still speak a patois of Elizabethan and Chaucerian, and settle fights by the old shotgun law of the hills.

(...)


Novelists and tourist agencies have romanticized the rug weaving, ballad singing "highlanders." Northern urbanites have dubbed them "hillbillies" (in Chicago) or "briers" (in Cincinnati.)

Somewhere in between is a more realistic picture of the
(Continued on page 4, col. 1)
southern mountaineers who have recently become known as one of the major minority groups in industrial centers where they have migrated.

_He's Just Different_

They are what sociologists call a "wasp" group--a group bearing all the earmarks of a majority, i. e. white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, but generally treated as a minority group because of their background and culture patterns.



(ADS-L ARCHIVES)
On Sun, 29 Dec 2002, Sam Clements wrote:

> M-W cites from 1957.  I know all about the 1962/64 cites from
> Palmore/Baltzell.  What I want is the cite from 1957.  Any help?  Or
> should I just write to M-W.  They've always replied before.  I just
> wanted a faster answer.

This is probably the 1957 citation I discovered and reported in an article
in American Speech some years ago:

1957 Andrew M. Hacker in _Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev._ LI. 1011
They are "WASPs" -- in the cocktail party jargon of the sociologists.
That is, they are white, they are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and they are
Protestant.

This may well be the earliest appearance in print of the term.

Fred Shapiro