[Ads-l] An interesting name from home

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Apr 7 18:21:08 UTC 2018


_Julyssabeth_ Vargas-Acuña, a pupil at the Price T. Young Elementary School
in Marshall, Texas.

Texas having once been the only state with a tripartite school system -
white, colored, and "Mexican" - a photo of a group of such kids all at the
same school is startling to someone like me, old enough to remember the bad
old days, which were psychologically worse than usual for the colored.

The original school system was bipartite: white and non-white. But the
"Mexicans" refused to be lumped together with the colored and the state
eventually agreed that, though the "Mexicans" were definitely not white,
still, they were superior to the colored and set up a third school system
for them. So, my grandparents went to school with "Mexicans," but my mother
went to schools that were all-colored.

And, at Marshall High School, the boys' teams are the "Mavericks" and the
girls' teams are the "Lady Mavericks." As I've mentioned, the _Lady_ prefix
is also used in personal names, cf. my cousin, Lady Percy Prothrow, b. 1946
in Marshall, daughter of my cousin, Percy Prothrow.

-- 
-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

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



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