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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: slurs, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. Ethnic Slurs. Part III: Another Derogatory Name for the Jew: Kike

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By Anatoly Liberman

Of all the ethnic slurs invented for a Jew, Kike is the best-known (a dubious distinction) and the most widely used. Dictionaries prefer to say that its origin is unknown, which is right but uninspiring. By contrast, the Internet and books on ethnic conflict and on American English offer such detailed summaries of opinions that I have little to add, except for outlining the nature of the problem. Some general ideas on the subject can also be found in my earlier post on Sheeny. (Dictionaries usually print such words with low-case letters, but I prefer to capitalize them. Though abhorrent to all decent people, they are, unfortunately, the names of nationalities and should be treated accordingly. That capitalizing ethnic names, the names of the days of the week/ the months of the year, and notional words in titles is silly is another matter, “not germane to the subject,” as a retired colleague of mine used to put it.)

In dealing with Kike, Sheeny, and so forth, the question arises whether the word came into being among the Jews (one group of the Jews may have tried to denigrate another group, as, presumably, happened in the history of Sheeny) or among their persecutors. Nothing is easier than to turn a perfectly innocent word into a slur. Names are perhaps the best candidates for this kind of transformation. Dago has become a mocking term for Italians, Spaniards, and the Portuguese (because so many of them were supposedly called Diego), while Abram (stress on the second syllable) is a great favorite of Russian anti-Semites, partly because it is a prototypical Jewish name and partly because it contains r, a trill the Jews often pronounce with a gh-like sound (“burr”). Hence the conjectures that Kike and Smouch are alterations of Ike “Isaac” and Moshe “Moses” respectively. However, the etymology of a low word, even of a low word inspired by low feelings, has to be investigated according to the same rules that hold for the rest of the vocabulary: one expects a plausible explanation of the sounds and reference to the milieu in which the word under discussion is believed to have emerged. Since no one has accounted for the phonetic change from Ike to Kike and from Moshe to Smouch; both guesses should be rejected without regret.

Another derivation traces Kike to the name Hayyim, transcribed in German as Chaim. Kaim “Jew” was recorded in mid-18th-century German cant. Then, we are told, “since Jewish speakers took -im of Kaim as a plural ending in Hebrew, they created a new singular *kai [an asterisk designates reconstructed, as opposed to attested, forms], which by reduplication gave the form ki-ki,” later simplified to Kike. It is hard to understand why Jewish speakers mistook the last syllable of the name they must have known for centuries for a plural ending. Would any English-speaker identify the final -s of Rose with a plural ending? And how did the reduplication arise? I don’t think this etymology is any better than the previous two.

Two main hypotheses on the origin of Kike are often mentioned. According to the first (its author is J.H.A. Lacher, 1926), the suffix -sky in the Jewish family names of emigrants from Poland and Russia became a linguistic marker of their poor manners (compare the adjective buttinsky, with its implied reference to the behavior of pertinacious Jews). Allegedly, the word arose among the Jews “of German origin, who soon insisted that the business ethics and the standard of living and culture of these Russians were far lower than theirs.” According to J.H.A. Lacher, the snobbish “brethren” of emigrants from the Slavic countries (most of whom ended up as traveling salesmen) called the newcomers kikis. Lacher gives no reference to his sources, except the following: “When I heard the term kikis for the first time at Winona, Minnesota, about forty years ago, it was a Jewish salesman of German descent who used it and explained it to me, but in the course of a few years it disappeared, kike being used instead.” We can assume that i in both syllables of kikis was long (as in the word sky, for instance). How did it develop from the short i/y of -sky? Also, s, the initial consonant of the suffix was supposedly left out and the remaining stub (-ky) reduplicated (again reduplicated!) and pronounced with a long vowel. Given such freedom of phonetic change, almost any combination of sounds can be shown to become any other. (Incidentally, in Minnesota the first vowel of Winona is short; stress falls on the second syllable, which is long.)

The second hypothesis turns round the Yiddish word for “circle” and has two variants. According to the main of them, on Ellis Island those immigrating Jews who knew neither English nor the Roman script were asked to put an X near their names, but looked upon it as a picture of the cross, a symbol of their former persecution, and instead put a circle. One of the variants of the Yiddish word for “circle” can be transcribed as kaykl, and this is said to be the etymon of Kike. Could the English speaking officials on Ellis Island isolate one Yiddish word in the speech of the Jewish people they dealt with, use it mockingly, and make it famous? I am afraid that we have here an example of the rich Ellis Island folklore that produced a Jew Shaun Ferguson and a Chinese man Sam Ting.

In an article by David L. Gold I read a slightly different version of the kaykl etymology, which he endorses, though cautiously. He quotes a letter to the editor of The American Israelite: “It seems probable that drummers [that is, traveling salesmen] called the Russian Jew, who unable to sign his name in English made his handmark in the form of the traditional Kykala [a diminutive form of Kaykl], a Kyke. The term undoubtedly originated as drummer slang.” We will dispense with the adverb undoubtedly, for in etymological research doubts are unavoidable, but accept the propositions that Kike, a disparaging term of Yiddish origin, was coined by the Jews and that its etymon must have contained a long vowel. The letter, dated July 23, 1914, was written relatively soon after the word Kike spread in American English. The OED could not find any mention of it prior to 1904. The tradition ascribing the coining of Kike to Jewish traveling salesmen (hucksters, hawkers, badgers) may be trustworthy. Compare the etymology of the English word slang (it can be found in an earlier post and in my dictionary); it also seems to have been coined by traveling salesmen.

However, the connection between Kike and Kaykl is hard to demonstrate and possible associations are many (couldn’t the reference be to the special routes of the Russian immigrants of Jewish descent or to their circle of support, the in group?). Although we cannot be certain of the word’s origin, we can perhaps account for its popularity. Palindromes (words that remain the same if pronounced backward) often have an expressive character: consider tit, tat, poop, peep, kick, sis, boob, and the rest. Kike is offensive because its very form demeans its target. Peter Tamony, a famous student of American slang, wrote an article on keeks, Kikes, and kooks. He had no linguistic background and sometimes allowed suspicious ideas to run away with him (does anyone still use run away in this sense?). His etymology of Kike hardly merits the briefest mention, but his intuition did not betray him. In a way, Kike indeed belongs with keek and kook. Too bad this linguistic perfection serves such an ugly cause.


Anatoly_libermanAnatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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2. Around Ethnic Slurs Part 1: Squaw

By Anatoly Liberman

Few words are more offensive than ethnic slurs. The origin of some of them is “neutral” (for instance, a proper name typical of a group), but the sting is in their application, not in their etymology. The story of squaw is well-known, but it bears repetition. It is also a sad story because it should not have happened.

In 1992 Suzan Harjo said to Oprah Winfrey that the word squaw means “vagina” and added: “That’ll give you an idea what the French and British fur trappers were calling all Indian women, and I hope no one ever uses that term again.” Countless TV viewers believed her and joined the ranks of protesters. Fight against the s-word began. On June 6, 1994 Saint Paul Pioneer Press carried an article titled “Students Seek to Expunge Place Name ‘Squaw’.” This is its beginning: “Squaw Lake. Minn. ASSOCIATED PRESS. Two high school students have launched a campaign to change the names of a small city, a reservation community, a half-dozen lakes and a pond, all of which contain the word ‘squaw’. The word, the students say, is offensive. Their teacher [I deleted the name] agrees. He referred to works by Saxon Gouge, an instructor in American literature at Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and a book Literature of the American Indian, which said the word probably is a French corruption of the Iroquois word “otsiskwa,” which means “female sexual parts.” The initiative met with near universal approval. The students were also encouraged by Indian elders and tribal authorities, who until they were enlightened by the two teenagers (or the TV show) had had no idea how bad the word squaw is. But “[b]oth students knew that the word went beyond its definition as ‘Indian woman’, found in some dictionaries, and they wrote letters to several newspapers advocating changes” (emphasis added).

The moral of this episode is that etymology is a science and in serious situations should be left to specialists. Neither an instructor in American literature nor Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peck, the authors of Literature of the American Indian, could have an informed opinion about word origins and should not have been cited as authorities. It is now an open secret that squaw has never meant “vagina, vulva,” but lots of people, including some Native Americans, decided that they had either done wrong or been wronged, and the fib triumphed, for any word means what speakers believe it means. This is how misspent political zeal turned squaw into an ethnic slur. Place names have been changed in Minnesota and Arizona, Utah did not stay away from the campaign, and there is little doubt that the stone will keep rolling. An ingenious author even mentioned the horrors of sound symbolism and explained that no one would want to be called a name beginning with the sounds one hears in squint, squat, squalid, and the like. I wonder whether he is equally squeamish when it comes to eating squash, crossing a square, or looking at squirrels playing in front of his house

Mohawk  ojiskwa (such is its usual spelling) does mean “vagina,” but squaw was borrowed by Europeans from Massachusett, the language of an Algonquian people, which is not related to Mohawk or any other Iroquoian language. Nor were there any cultural ties between the two communities, separated by half of North America (a reminder: Massachusetts is not in the Midwest, and the action of The Song of Hiawatha is not set in Massachusetts). By contrast, cognates of squaw exist in many Algonquian languages and mean “woman” in all of them. Present day Mohawk speakers do not identify the English word squaw with any word in their language. The similarity between -sqwa and squaw is accidental. One can as well compare squaw with the last syllable of Moskva.

The motto of every political initiative should be: “Do no harm” (as in medicine). Looking before leaping is also useful. Although language is easy to politicize, historical linguistics rarely falls prey to this kind of maneuvering. Rabble rousers occasionally use borrowed words for boosting the national pride of their group, but in retrospect such campaigns fill the victims of fraud with shame and surprise at their gullibility. Words for “woman” have a tendency to deteriorate: from “the loved one” to “whore,” from “maid(en)” to “a pert, saucy girl,” and so forth. The causes of such changes reflect the societal attitudes that are known only too well. But the recent history of squaw is a unique case: ignorant people explained to native speakers that the word of their mother tongue is an ethnic slur. Some evidence exists that in English (but not in Mohawk!) squaw was used in a disparaging way. This happened because some people chose to treat the Indians as unworthy of respect. Compare nigger (which, like Negro) means simply “black”), pickaninny (perhaps from Portuguese; the original meaning is approximately “a small one”), and zhid (a slur for a Russian Jew, probably from Italian giudeo, from Latin judaeus “belonging or pertaining to Judea”). All of them are racist terms despite their innocuous etymology. Depending on the mores of a given society, squaw had the potential of becoming offensive. Compare madam “a woman who manages a brothel” or villager acquiring in the Middle Ages the connotations of villain, whereas things urban, naturally, became urbane. If squaw had to be ostracized, it should not have happened for etymological reasons.

Anyone with an interest in this problem will find abundant material in the Internet, in the magazine Native Peoples, and other sources. The article “The Sociolinguistics of the ‘S-Word’: Squaw in American Placenames [sic]” by William Bright was published in the periodical Names (vol. 48, 2000, 207-216) but is also available online, and so is the passionate defense of the word by Marge Bruchac.


Anatoly_libermanAnatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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