slur & epithet, racially derogatory word

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

Thanks,  Neal, this is one-stop shopping. It seems to confirm that this use of 'slur' was a creation of African American speech (or of the African American media, anyway) before spreading to the white mainstream in the early 60's. Needless to say, there are a whole lot of std English words that began their lives as AA vernacular, but 'slur' seems to be different: it has never been slang in either variety and doesn't seem to have worked its way up from vernacular speech--it's as if it went right from the pages of Ebony to Time magazine. Hard to think of any other words, or new word senses, that have followed this course. Or am I (not for the first time) missing something?

Geoff


> From: Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Date: March 30, 2013 3:28:55 PM PDT
> Subject: Re: slur & epithet, "racially derogatory word"
> 
> 
> I wrote on this topic for Visual Thesaurus last year:
> 
> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/slurred-language/
> 
> Neal Whitman
> 
> On Mar 30, 2013, at 11:08 AM, Geoffrey Nunberg <nunberg at ISCHOOL.BERKELEY.EDU> wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Geoffrey Nunberg <nunberg at ISCHOOL.BERKELEY.EDU>
>> Subject:      slur & epithet, "racially derogatory word"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> I�m trying to figure out when �(racial) slur� entered the mainstream vocabulary in the sense of �derogatory word,� as opposed simply to an insulting or defamatory remark. Ngrams shows the phrase "racial slur" as quite rare before the 60s. In Google Books and Proquest, it seems to have been used in this sense before then predominantly in African American publications like Ebony, Jet, and the Chicago Defender (where early cites refer, to a 1942 NAACP objection Lucky Strike�s �nigger head� brand tobacco and complaints from black students in the same year about being required to sing Stephen Foster songs about �darkies�). In other sources, it seems to be chiefly used in this period mostly to refer to insults or disparaging remarks or actions having to do with race (in one case when an officer in Korea tells white soldiers that the colored officers have stuck with the troops more than they have; in another, by Nixon to describe the charge that he was anti-Semitic; in another when!
>> a NY barber posts a sign charging patrons more for �kinky� haircuts).
>> 
>> I don't know that it matters exactly when the word was first used in this sense, but it would be important to know how and when the sense developed and spread. Did it first take root among African Americans and spread to the white mainstream media in the context of the civil rights movement or growing white sensitivity about racial issues?
>> 
>> This sense of the word isn�t recorded in the OED, which hasn�t updated the entry for �slur� since 1912. Odd that this word hasn�t been singled out for out-of-sequence revision, given its cultural significance. (Jesse, you must have scads of stuff on this your files.) It also isn't in M-W or the AHD, unless you allow that it's accounted for with "A disparaging remark; an aspersion." I don't think that's an accurate description of "nigger" or "fag"; at least it doesn't suggest that these are particular words.
>> 
>> "Racial epithet" seems to have undergone a parallel development. The first nine cites for "racial epithete" in Proquest Hist Newspapers (and 47 of the first 50 from 1942 to 1961) are all from the Chicago Defender. The OED does have this sense for 'epithet'  ("An offensive or derogatory expression used of a person; an abusive term; a profanity"), though the cites involve only words like "bastard" and "swine." (Nowadays, it seems to me, when someone is described as having "used an epithet," it's dollars to doughnuts the word in question was either "fuck" or "nigger.")
>> 
>> Geoff

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org