[Lexicog] cotton-picking

[Fritz Goerling]

What does the expression "God bless his cotton-picking soul"
mean which I heard in the States?

Fritz Goerling


  I'm not sure that I see the point about "cotton-picking" being
  racist. While, at least in the US, the people who picked cotton
  were for a long time black slaves, as I understand it the phrase
  has nothing to do with who did the work, it has to do with the
  nature of the work. "cotton-picking" means "unpleasant and tediously
  detailed" because (I am told - as a northerner I have no experience
  of picking cotton) picking cotton involves pulling off each individual
  tuft of cotton (you can't just knock them off as you can many kinds
  of berries) and so is quite tedious and leads to repetitive motion
  injuries. I have the vague memory that there is also something
  scratchy on cotton plants.
  --
  Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
  http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu



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