Spic
Spic (or spick) is an ethnic slur used in the United States to describe Hispanic and Latino Americans or Spanish-speaking people from Latin America.
Etymology and history
[edit ]Some sources from the United States believe that the word spic is a play on a Spanish-accented pronunciation of the English word speak.[1] [2] [3] The Oxford English Dictionary takes spic to be a contraction of the earlier form spiggoty.[4] The oldest known use of spiggoty is in 1910 by Wilbur Lawton in Boy Aviators in Nicaragua, or, In League with the Insurgents. Stuart Berg Flexner, in I Hear America Talking (1976), favored the explanation that it derives from "no spik Ingles" (or "no spika de Ingles").[5]
However, in an earlier publication, the 1960 Dictionary of American Slang, written by Dr. Harold Wentworth, with Flexner as second author, spic is first identified as a noun for an Italian or "American of Italian ancestry", along with the words spic, spig, and spiggoty, and confirms that it is shortened from the word spaghetti . The authors refer to the word's usage in James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, referring to a "wop or spig", and say that this term was never preferred over wop , and has been rarely used since 1915. However, the etymology remains.[6]
See also
[edit ]References
[edit ]- ^ "SPIC". Archived from the original on 2008年10月12日. Retrieved 2008年11月07日. Interactive Dictionary of Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.
- ^ "Spic. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000". Archived from the original on 2007年11月18日. Retrieved 2007年04月13日. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.
- ^ Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
- ^ "spiggoty" . Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.) citing as an etymology Amer. Speech XIII. 311/1 (1938) 'Spiggoty' originated in Panama during Construction Days, and is assumed to be a corruption of ‘spikee de’ in the sentence ‘No spikee de English’, which was then the most common response of Panamanians to any question in English.
- ^ Take Our Word for It June 21, 1999, Issue 45 of etymology webzine.
- ^ Wentworth, Harold, and Flexner, Stuart Berg. The Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960, pp. 507.
External links
[edit ]The dictionary definition of spic at Wiktionary
