Origin of word "redskin"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I'm wondering - genuinely - roughly what percentage of Native Americans

a) truly find "redskin" to be a personally offensive term per se (plenty, I would think), and

b) truly find "Redskins" [sic] to be personally offensive as the name of a highly visible professional football team for decades (a lot less, IWT).

I'm startled at Geoff's suggestion that even if the lurid scalping "etymology" is known to be false, it should be given a pass because it "does good work."  Homey don't play that.

A couple of years ago the Cartoon Network yanked their Speedy Gonzalez cartoons as offensive to Hispanic Americans.  I don't know how this sorted out, but one Hispanic-American org protested the ban by saying Speedy Gonzalez was funny and a good guy, that aside from Zorro he was almost the only enduringly visible Mexican character in American pop culture, and that only condescending cryptoracists would believe that many Hispanics took offense over a silly cartoon mouse who was no worse a caricature than whitebread butthead Elmer Fudd  (I paraphrase, of course).  The proper course would have been, not fewer mice, but more good Hispanic characters in our pop culture.

Naturally, in the colubrine world of media publicity, the protest may have been staged by an ad-hoc front group for the Dark Side, but it does present an interesting point of view.

Gadflyingly,

JL


"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: Origin of word "redskin"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On May 26, 2005, at 10:44 AM, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> ... The blood-dripping scalp
> story, though, is pretty clearly not historically true. The term
> was in use long
> before scalp-taking was even thought of.they were speaking of folks
> who had
> affiliation with the sports team.
>
> ... Most recently, a federal court ruled that the football team has
> a legitimate
> right to the trademark--that it is not "scandalous" or "defamatory" or
> "derogatory." The court overruled a decision to the contrary by the
> federal trademark board.


geoff nunberg, who testified in the Redskins case, discusses deford's
claim at:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002194.html

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