Comments on: Monthly Gleanings, Part I: (August 2009)

By: Ethnic Slurs. Part III: Another Derogatory Name for the Jew: Kike | OUPblog

Ethnic Slurs. Part III: Another Derogatory Name for the Jew: Kike | OUPblog — Mon, 27 May 2013 00:32:34 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Martin Laplante

Martin Laplante — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:46:11 +0000

Since Prof. Maher has just brought this up again, I think that the type of indigenous etymologist required is one that specializes in French in North America. After all the term is also used in French and it would be interesting to find out whether it came to English via French or vice-versa. Harjo is clearly implying that it was the French explorers who adopted the term believing it to be derogatory, and who named geographical features.

The question of toponymy is verifiable, I don’t know whether anyone has checked who named those features. But on the first question, etymologists of the English language can relax, the meaning of the English term is not at issue.

Given the history of New France, it strikes me as unlikely that they would have a better mastery of Mohawk than of Algonquian languages. This applies to both the original introduction of the word into the French language and its subsequent use of the word by French-speaking explorers perhaps some generations later. The question is worthy of research.

The later use of squaw in place names by English speaking settlers may in fact be derogatory. North America has no lack of place names that are bawdy and disrespectful of women of all ethnicities, including quite a few referring to various body parts of native women. I recommend Mark Monmonnier’s book “From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow” for an overview of offensive toponyms.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:25:21 +0000

I’m not sure why I show up as “Anonymous” above; anyhow, Anonymous in this case is distinctly nonymous, to wit, John Cowan.

By: Ethnic Slurs. Part III: Another Derogatory Name for the Jew: Kike : OUPblog

Ethnic Slurs. Part III: Another Derogatory Name for the Jew: Kike : OUPblog — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:44:29 +0000

By: J P Maher

J P Maher — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:52:35 +0000

Re “three people put their foot in their mouth.” This is the curse of languages having grammatical number (singular, plural, dual etc.) – The Chinese can laugh at us. The metaphorical phrases “tongue-in cheek” and “foot in mouth” are distributive (one per person). Each of us has two (facial) cheeks, but one tongue per person, excluding the congenital conditions of polycephaly, diprosopus etc. I figuratively put my foot in my mouth, yet I have one mouth and two feet. The paired organ is mentioned in the singular. If firemen lose their lives in a blaze, a comparable problem crops up. This is less a problem of grammar than of written language, i.e. style, so my prescription is stylistic. Avoid the syntax “their lives, their feet, mouths, tongues, cheeks”. Since the phrases are in effect crypto-adverbs of manner, we can keep the pithy saying by writing the preposition “with” in front of the phrases “tongue in cheek, foot in mouth” etc. The three people in question argued with foot in mouth. Another stylistic turn would be to suppress the number markers and pronouns: “all three put foot in mouth”.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:09:23 +0000

I think the commentators on squaw have this much right: that it was derogatory long before the 1990s. However, based on written evidence alone it’s hard to tell the difference between a derogatory term and a neutral term applied to a despised group.

You are, of course, sound on the etymology, and I have duly defended you at that page, with the qualification above.