[Ads-l] Bammer

[Margaret Lee]

I think the purpose of the term was to show that Blacks who had migrated from the South to the North were more cool and hip than those left in the South.  Not so much emphasis on the 'rural South,' but the South in general.  Those left behind or those new to the North were considered 'country bumpkins.'
--Margaret Lee

 
      From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com>
 To: Margaret Lee <mlee303 at yahoo.com> 
 Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2016 7:27 PM
 Subject: Re: Bammer
   

On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Margaret Lee <0000006730deb3bf-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

In the African American community for decades, 'bama' / 'bamma'  has been an "unfavorable term to describe a person from the South, who is perceived as 'country,' without social refinement, unsophisticated ...Probably derived from the shortened version of 'Alabama' " 

She should have made clear that this lack is understood to be the consequence of stomp-down, Southern racism, particularly in the Deep-South states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina,  and is not regarded as simply the natural state of a black person from the rural South.
There's also the expression,
_born in the Bam_
with the same meaning as
_born in a barn_
wherein _the Bam_ is "the state of Alabama." The former expression may be a pun on the latter, but...
Youneverknow.

-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain



   
 

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