Terms Which Have Disappeared

The only time in my life I ever got slapped in the face for saying a word was when I was about six years old and my grandmother heard me call another kid in the street the N word. She had a deep, deep antipathy to that word, and hit me so hard my teeth rattled. I never forgot that.

The N-word was commonly used where I grew up but not necessarily with derogatory intention, although it still carried an unavoidable degree of racism. But Italians, no matter what they may have been called, were virtually invisible as part of the population as well as a very minor part of it. Jews, however, were totally absent and I suspect that no one there really understood that Jewish people actually existed in this country, or at least not around there. But a class photo of my mother in 1932, same high school I attended, proves that to be incorrect. It also proves that kids today don't have the same names they had. So there were none of those words used to describe Jews at all or, for that matter, Asians. I expect most people knew the terms but there was never any occasion for their use.

Ultimately, I think perhaps racism may be reduced to simple black and white terms for most people. The problem that confuses people now is that in some areas, some more than others, the diversity is such that the black/white division model doesn't work anymore but it is still forced on the situation. It has become a case of white or non-white, which of course is a term of long use. Even "people of color" was in use in the 18th century, at least in print. But it doesn't really matter to most people what color you actually are. All that matters, then, is who gets to say what color you are.

Referring here to the late-arriving posts, one of my former colleagues here at work started out working in the financial district in New York. Her description of an eye-opening party that was apparently accompanied by "half-naked women" was funny but no more so than her description of the bonds department, staffed by old men. She was from Brooklyn and retained the accent. I attended her wedding and those in attendance from New York looked like movie characters. Her grandparents were from Sicily, so I would tease her about not really being Italian after all.

Upon reflection, it may be that one reason that the fathers that I knew when I was little were not really very talkative, although my father was. I also wonder if the kids who used certain words and hand gestures really understood what they meant.

BlueTrain said:

The N-word was commonly used where I grew up but not necessarily with derogatory intention, although it still carried an unavoidable degree of racism. But Italians, no matter what they may have been called, were virtually invisible as part of the population as well as a very minor part of it. Jews, however, were totally absent and I suspect that no one there really understood that Jewish people actually existed in this country, or at least not around there. But a class photo of my mother in 1932, same high school I attended, proves that to be incorrect. It also proves that kids today don't have the same names they had. So there were none of those words used to describe Jews at all or, for that matter, Asians. I expect most people knew the terms but there was never any occasion for their use.

Ultimately, I think perhaps racism may be reduced to simple black and white terms for most people. The problem that confuses people now is that in some areas, some more than others, the diversity is such that the black/white division model doesn't work anymore but it is still forced on the situation. It has become a case of white or non-white, which of course is a term of long use. Even "people of color" was in use in the 18th century, at least in print. But it doesn't really matter to most people what color you actually are. All that matters, then, is who gets to say what color you are.

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Maine was and still is the whitest state in the Union -- there are more people of Native American descent than African-Americans or Latino-Americans -- and as a result people here tended, and still tend, to grow up with extremely naive views of what race is and what it means in general. It's only in the last twenty years or so that this has begun to change, which is a very good thing. i can remember abandoning my mother in a restaurant when I was in my early twenties because she was making comments about an interracial couple at a nearby table -- I just got up in the middle of the meal and left, and wouldn't speak to her for quite a while after that. She has matured considerably since then, though, and is greatly embarassed by the attitudes she once espoused.

My grandmother's hatred of the N word stemmed from a very specifc incident in her childhood. When she was about seven or eight years old, around 1918 or 1919, she was hanging out by the rallroad tracks with some friends when a black man who did odd jobs around the neighborhood walked by. One of the kids yelled "hey N-word," the others picked it up, and they started to throw rocks at him as he walked down the tracks. My grandmother, who was probably the youngest kid in the group, joined in. She regretted doing so for the rest of her life -- it was a deeply painful memory for her, and she always wished she could have made amends for it. Not allowing the use of that word in her presence was one way in which she tried.

Our neighborhood was almost entirely Scotch-Irish Protestant. Catholicism was exotic to us -- and its practitioners were sometimes referred to as "mackerel snappers," which was ironic since mackerel was a staple food for all of us -- but there was and still is a small but vigorous Jewish population along the Maine coast, and I don't remember Jewish folk ever being referred to in any kind of a negative way. I didn't learn those slurs until I started paging thru copies of the "Spotlight" that a Cartoite acquaintance of my uncle's would leave around the gas station, and I found it revolting, but illuminating, that such things were still being taught and believed by even a small segment of the lunatic fringe.

2jakes said:

Are you sure you want to board this train?


Cheers Big Don!

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Considering I know I've posted to people more than 4 decades my junior and 1 my senior on this forum, ain't afraid of that train.

Tell me, does anyone still go out for "a night on the town" or "to do the town?" One of the big days to do that is coming up in a few days, too, and it's even a Saturday night to boot! Or did that end when the big hotel in the small town stopped having a dance band?

Sorry to veer off the topic like this.

Fading Fast said:

My girlfriend and I used to joke that Ian McShane's character Al Swearengen (intentionally named) used the F-word as every part of speech - noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc., - and, if you add in c***sucker, you have basically exhausted his vocabulary.

But the man can act.

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Al Swearengen was a real man who ran saloons and brothels in Deadwood in the 19th century. The appropriateness of his name was pure serendipity for the series writers.

Inkstainedwretch said:

Al Swearengen was a real man who ran saloons and brothels in Deadwood in the 19th century. The appropriateness of his name was pure serendipity for the series writers.

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That's great. Always better that way.

BlueTrain said:

Referring here to the late-arriving posts, one of my former colleagues here at work started out working in the financial district in New York. Her description of an eye-opening party that was apparently accompanied by "half-naked women" was funny but no more so than her description of the bonds department, staffed by old men. She was from Brooklyn and retained the accent. I attended her wedding and those in attendance from New York looked like movie characters. Her grandparents were from Sicily, so I would tease her about not really being Italian after all.

Upon reflection, it may be that one reason that the fathers that I knew when I was little were not really very talkative, although my father was. I also wonder if the kids who used certain words and hand gestures really understood what they meant.

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Up until the last 20 or so years (when "quants" with elite-school degrees became the norm), large parts of Wall Street (the non-white-shoe parts as noted in a post above) were populated by "characters." It wasn't whispered that firms were "Irish" or "Italian" or "Jewish," but shouted out loud. Stereotyping - IMHO, for the most part, in a good-natured way that seems beyond the understanding by many today - of these firms and the characters that populated them was normal conversation. When an Italian friend of mine went to work at a predominantly Irish firm in the early '90s, it was openly joked that he was "the token Italian."

And the generation before mine, the guys who were in their 40s in the '80s, seemed out of the movies. They fit many of the stereotypes and announced that fact loudly. Again, IMHO, for the most part, it seemed good natured to me. Also, it was a time when many firms where still partnerships (that's all but ended now) and the partners all had their capital (and all or most of their wealth) tied up in the companies, so the firms had more of a family feel.

As noted above, today's hypersensitivity to any acknowledgment of ethnic characteristics would struggle to understand the zeitgeist of the period. If I had seen prejudice thwarting advancement and opportunity and real racial / ethnic asperity writ large (to this day, there are always one-off idiots who traffic in that), I'd say it, but I didn't see it. What I saw was an open acknowledgment of group differences and characteristics - a lot of playful kidding and mocking that would horrify today's cultural standards - but all of that was relegated to the not-business hard-core joking side of Wall Street - when it came to business, it seemed to me that those items didn't come into play.

Before I am lambasted here, let me shout, I passionately believe the goal of a prejudice free society is the ideal. My point above is that the Wall Street I grew up in had an ease with ethnic stereotyping that, IMHO, wasn't reflective of real prejudices. Again, were there one-offs and bad actors - of course, but I haven't seen that today's approach has eliminate that either.

It might be that we aren't nearly as sensitive as some claim we are. Those who say so have their own "agendas," as much as I dislike that word. I don't believe that the gigantic corporations that rule the world now are especially interested in race or ethnicity. The ones at the top just had all the advantages and got there first.

At the same time, it is well to remember that "prejudice" means a preconceived opinion about something and usually in a negative way. But keep in mind that many people have a strong negative opinion about something because of their own past experiences, at least they way they saw it.

How do you call them in the US, today?

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=schaumküsse&FORM=HDRSC2

Chocolate marshmallows?

Fading Fast said:

Up until the last 20 or so years (when "quants" with elite-school degrees became the norm), large parts of Wall Street (the non-white-shoe parts as noted in a post above) were populated by "characters." It wasn't whispered that firms were "Irish" or "Italian" or "Jewish," but shouted out loud.

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We've got an ambulance chasing, TV advertising law firm around here whose list of senior partners sound like something out of Archie Bunker's reference....Irish, Italian, Jewish, and (as Mr Bunker would say) "the normal guy."

Trenchfriend said:

How do you call them in the US, today?

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=schaumküsse&FORM=HDRSC2

Chocolate marshmallows?

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We do call them chocolate marshmallows. That said, I have had the exact ones that you reference (from a German store in an old German neighborhood) and there is a slight difference. The ones you reference have some sort of rice paper bottom which American-made ones don't have - the Americans one will just coat the marshmallow in chocolate without any rice paper.

LizzieMaine said:

Which is exactly why I love English so, with all its dialects and crudities and pointed expressions. Prissiness has no place in a living language.

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English is a Germanic language, even with all the words borrowed from other languages. I have heard that while it is possible to construct a sentence using only Germanic words, it is not possible to construct one that does not use at least one Germanic word.

Bigger Don said:

We've got an ambulance chasing, TV advertising law firm around here whose list of senior partners sound like something out of Archie Bunker's reference....Irish, Italian, Jewish, and (as Mr Bunker would say) "the normal guy."

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I always liked (wincingly) the way Archie described the law firm he employed should he have to sue somebody: "four savage Jews who'll strip your bones bare."

LizzieMaine said:

A good guide to the language used during WWII is Norman Mailer's 1948 novel "The Naked and the Dead," in which he tried to be as realistic as possible about how the troops talked. His publishers, however, forced him to invent the substitute vulgarism "fug," instead using The Word. The book is therefore filled with "fug," "fuggin'" "fug you," "mother-fugger," "mother-fuggin" and so forth and so on. And of course, the F in "SNAFU" doesn't mean "Fouled."

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Which led to the name of this band:

Inkstainedwretch said:

I always liked (wincingly) the way Archie described the law firm he employed should he have to sue somebody: "four savage Jews who'll strip your bones bare."

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That's not the way I remember it. I remember something like ...hmmmm...looking it up...it was the Jew for one thing, the Eye-talian for something else ... can't find it, but as I think about it the discussion was something like this:
Archie: Edith! Call the lawyers!
Edith: What lawyers?
Archie: O'Hara, Rabinowitz, Scarpelli, and Smith
Edith (dialing): Which one?
Archie: How many times...the Mick for bar fights, the Jew for suing, the Eye-tie for union stuff, and the normal guy for everything else.

2jakes said:

The language in this series of the West comes to mind.
Although perhaps a bit overcooked at times.

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I've mentioned this in a thread or two here before, but not long after Deadwood was deemed a "hit" the Los Angeles Times ran an article about the show's use of "colorful" language. While they acknowledged the overall language used on the show had been modernized to make it easier for audiences to understand what they were saying, they also verified the words, terms, and phrases heard in the show were indeed in use in the late-1800s. They went on to explain that Deadwood, South Dakota, was one of those towns where the veneer of civility barely existed--the worst kind of behavior was tolerated, and even encouraged--so the use of such language in the show, and the way they used it, was appropriate.

Boston magazine Liberty identifies both obscenity and profanity as types of
swearing which was common in 1887.
But most did not subscribe to the Fedora Lounge to discuss & share with others.

Just a bunch of "goobers"!