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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Evidently so. But again, the nickname was more derisive than contemptuous,
or so it seems today.

To enlarge a bit further on recent reclamations.  They seem to have been
"reclaimed" chiefly by postmodernists in fields like "cultural studies."
 How many of them, I wonder, would feel fine about using the words
nonchalantly to persons on the lower slopes of  Trendy Mountain?

Also, "reclamation" is an odd word, since the targeted groups never
"claimed" them in the first place.

JL



On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 5:15 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Pied noir: an American connection? or maybe not...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > 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.
> >
> > LH
>
> Wasn't "Yankee Doodle" a derisive song taken over by the colonists?
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
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