Pied noir: an American connection? or maybe not...

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

Wasn't reclamation a frequent pattern with disparaging state nicknames
like "tarheel," "leatherhead," and "hoosier," Jonathan? RHDAS gives
neutral senses for some of these by the mid-19th c.

Geoff

> At 10:30 AM -0600 1/18/10, Jim Parish wrote:
> >Laurence Horn wrote:
> >>  At 10:59 AM -0500 1/18/10, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >>  >Is "reclamation" a very recent phenomenon? Offhand, I can't
> think of
> >>  >anything before "black" (ca1969).
> >>  >
> >>  >
> >>  >JL
> >>
> >>  I think in political and religious contexts it's
> >>  been around for awhile, for example for some of
> >>  those -ers we were talking about (Quaker, Shaker)
> >>  and their relatives.  And didn't "Whig" and
> >>  "Tory" start out as insults? I'm not sure this is
> >>  the same phenomenon, but it's close.
> >
> >More recent than these examples, but my understanding is that
> "suffragette"
> >began as an insult (they preferred to be called "suffragists").
> >
> >Jim Parish
>
> Was "suffragette" ever embraced by its adherents?  Or is it more like
> "women's libber", which was never reclaimed.
>
> There are also the -ites for those who at least initially preferred
> -ists, as in "Trotskyite".  Again, I'm not sure if these were
> reclaimed or just used so widely that the adherents had no choice.
> (I'm excluding nonce exclamations along the lines of "Yes, I'm a(n)
> ____, and proud of it!")
>
> Let's see what happens to "tea-bagger".
>
> LH
>
>


Geoffrey Nunberg
Adjunct Full Professor
School of Information
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley CA 94720
ph. 510-643-3894
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/
nunberg at ischool.berkeley.edu

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