"Indian summer" & "Indian" as disparaging adjective

[David D. Robertson]

Hi,

Frank Abate's post on the American Dialect Society list (excerpted below)
is of relevance to our Chinook Jargon list.  You may know that there are
several terms, in CJ and in regional English, of the form "Indian X", where
X is some noun -- Think of "Indian tea" or "sawash kushu"
(literally "Indian pig", i.e. "seal").  In some of these cases, "Indian"
seems to serve mainly to distinguish from the Euro-American variety of a
given item; in others, "Indian" seems to have a pejorative sense, as though
to label something as an inferior instantiation of a type.  A closely
related example is the Alaskan English term for dried salmon, "squaw
candy".  It's interesting to contemplate in which cases these sorts of
terms in Chinook Jargon contain "Indian/sawash" as a negative, and in which
ones that's a more neutral descriptor.  --  Dave

[Frank Abate wrote on the ADS-L list:]
Frank Abate <abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET> Subject: FW: Indian Summer, The Smoky
Mountains, and pollution Comments: To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Content-Type:
text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
…2. For Indian summer, since it has now come up, I want to throw out to the
lists a theory I have on this -- that, in the same vein as the disparaging
terms using "Dutch" (D. courage, etc.), this TOO is simply a disparaging
term. The idea is that Indians were thought of as deceptive or fickle by
early white settlers, and so the term arose in reference to a brief period
in the fall when it appears that summer has returned, when in fact it has
not -- the period is merely the last few days of fairly warm daytime temps
before the fall and winter freezing daytime temps begin consistently.
I believe Mencken proposes the above etym in his American Language. Though
it likely cannot be proven as the origin of the term, it has the "ring of
truth", it seems to me, even though it is not PC. The early white settlers
never heard of no PC, of course.
So maybe some folks on the lists can bring some more facts forward? Early
cites, esp. antedatings of the late 1700s, would be great.
Frank Abate