[Ads-l] Antedating of "Welfare Queen"

[Laurence Horn]

Indeed, but given that proper names, whether those for horses or humans, don’t actually mean anything*, we don’t know if this is effectively a bracketed entry disconnected from the 1974 et seq. pejoratives. I can’t begin to speculate on what scenario the namer had in mind. It does come only one year before the Linda Taylor episode (as opposed to a hypothetical horse named Welfare Queen in 1933), so maybe no brackets are needed, but how can we tell whether it involved the trope (with or without racist intention)?

*“This is America. Our names don’t mean shit.”
—Butch (Bruce Willis), _Pulp Fiction_. See Kripke, _Naming and Necessity_ for theoretical support via Direct Reference theory.



> On Jan 1, 2025, at 4:41 PM, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
> 
> A massive upset in the race for earliest example of _welfare queen_!
> 
> Jesse Sheidlower
> 
> On Wed, Jan 01, 2025 at 08:54:27PM +0000, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>> Over the years there has been some mention on this list of "Shapiro's Law," which claims that there are a surprising number of words and phrases that originate as the name of a racehorse.  Here is another example: The OED's earliest citation for the racist trope "welfare queen" is dated 1974, relating to a woman named Linda Taylor.  Wikipedia regards the Taylor story as the origin of the term.
>> 
>> A Newspapers.com search pulls up the Omaha World-Herald, 7 June 1973, page 38, column 2, where the horse-race listings include a horse named Welfare Queen.  This seems like a very odd name to give to a horse, but there it is.
>> 
>> Fred Shapiro
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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