"Indian summer" & "Indian" as disparaging adjective

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Oh, good grief. While I  won't touch the hot-buttons about contemporary
use or the historical validity of place-names incorporating "squaw" or
"siwash," I feel a need to defend "Indian Summer" as harmless, if not
innocent. When we were kids we thought of it as our last chance to get
outside to play before the winter rains set in (it was forever raining
in western Oregon in the early sixties); it therefore had a kind of
romantic, wistful feel to us. We associated it with Halloween and
(naively) imagined this mini-season was perhaps once the Natives' last
chance to hunt, fish, gather, and otherwise prepare for winter. If it
had a mocking origin, I think we can safely assume it's been completely
forgotten by now.

At the risk of sounding pedantic (but not having a degree, it's a rare
indulgence), I might point out the pejoratives "Dutch"-whatever (cited
as parallels on the Linguist List) were aimed by the English at the
Germans (viz., "deutsche") centuries ago, and had nothing to do with The
Netherlands.

(The temporary renaming of "french fries" to "liberty fries" by some
establishments during our recent Security Council squabble reminded me
of the official WWI promotion of sauerkraut as "Liberty cabbage"; it was
cheap and we had plenty of it, and the government feared popular
avoidance resulting from the German name might adversely impact
nutrition. Of course, "french fries" might better be called "sliced
potatoes boiled in grease" as a public health measure; they aren't even
French in origin--just the slicing method-- which is why it ain't even
capitalized. Oh never mind I'm starting to ramble on the list again.......)

Jeff