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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Very true, Larry and Geoff.  I guess what distinguishes the recent
"reclamations" (except possibly "suffragette"), if anything, is that each
term was originally terribly pejorative rather than humorous or satirical.

Contrast "Tarheel," "Hoosier," even "Leatherhead" (uncommon, I think) with
"Puke," a Missourian.  Not a proud nickname in the Show-Me State today,
presumably because there's nothing funny about it.

Another difference, I would venture, is that reclamations like "queer" have
been reclaimed rather rapidly at the elite rather than the popular level,
the result, it seems, of intentionally applying theory to usage rather than
as part of a slow linguistic process.

JL




 On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Geoffrey Nunberg <
nunberg at ischool.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Geoffrey Nunberg <nunberg at ISCHOOL.BERKELEY.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Pied noir: an American connection? or maybe not...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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