[Ads-l] Antedating of "Welfare Queen"

[John Baker]

The closeness in time speaks loudly, but otherwise the connection is conjectural. For example, might the horse’s owner have chosen the name from a concern that his spendings on the horse could put him on welfare? It is hard to envision a scenario where a horse’s name is intended to refer to the racist trope. 

In any case, here is an earlier example, presumably referring to the same horse: 

“Half mile and 70 yards for two-year-olds . . . second, Welfare Queen, owned by Loren Fear of Missouri . . . .”

Miami News-Record, June 26, 1972, at 5 (NewspaperArchive). 


John Baker



> On Jan 2, 2025, at 2:07 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>>> 
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