"critter"

[Arnold Zwicky]

A friend posted on Facebook a little while back about the Little Critter and Little Monster books for kids, which, as it turned out, she had gotten confused. The basic facts about the books:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Critter :

Little Critter is an anthropomorphic animal character created by Mercer Mayer. According to the official website, his animal species is just a Little Critter even though he, some friends, family and others like him looked like hamster-guinea pig hybrids. [series of books starting in 1975]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Monster :

Little Monster is an anthropomorphic character created by Mercer Mayer. He looks like a mix of a dinosaur and a dragon. [series of books starting in 1977]

She went on to say: "my feeling is that the way the word critter has been used as a racial slur in the past makes it feel very wrong in this context." (That would be "critter" used as a milder version of the slur "nigger".)

This produced widespread puzzlement on the part of her readers. Racial slur?

At first she thought it might be a southernism (she's lived most of her life below the Mason-Dixon Line), but I could find no evidence of this in any of the relevant dictionaries (which had lots of interesting things about the phonology, meanings, history, and geographical and social distribution of the item). The most relevant finding was that "critter" can be used to disparage specific human beings (by comparing them to beasts), but there was no evidence of its being used to pick out particular social groups (blacks or others).

Other Southerners chimed in to say that they had never heard "critter" used this way. (It's possible that the usage is restricted to a very small group of people -- much like a "family word".)

Has anyone here experienced this usage? Or even heard of it?

arnold

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