The Friday Fillip

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.

And in country too…

Which is why I was taken aback when I learned that some in the U.S. use “Canadian” as a disguised slur to refer to Blacks — as code for the ‘n’ word, in effect. As is common on the web I learned this fourth hand, and traced the story back from the Language Log, to Defending People, the Art and Science of Criminal Defense Trial Lawyering, which had a brief post about a memo from the Harris County (Texas) D.A. that congratulated “a prosecutor on convicting a guy while overcoming ‘a subversively good defense by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant . . . .’ “; this blog post led back to The Daily Bellwether, and ultimately to CindyBlurg’s “The Sheriff is a Canadian.” One of Cindy’s friends told her the story of

when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn’t understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else.

After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her coworkers. He told her that ‘Canadian’ was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to as [N-word]s. And for various reasons it didn’t sound at all unusual for the average backwards-ass Southerner to say things like, “Those damn Canadians,” or “The problem is all those Canadians.”

Along the way I discovered the unhappy Racial Slur Database where, sure enough, “Canadian” “Canadian Goose” and “Canuck” can be found.

Somehow, too, I wound up on a linguistics email list (remember Listserv? which is the name of the program, not the list itself) where I came across a posting by Stefan Dollinger, a linguist from UBC (and the editor of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles – DCHP) on the subject of “Canadians.” He opined:

In general, my educated guess is that this may well be the recycling of a “racial” slur of yesteryear in a new form – from the U.S. meaning of “Canuck” (note again: it’s a term of high prestige in Canada) to a new U.S. meaning of “Canadian” in this particular context. And again, this tells us more about the users and their perceptions of “out-group” and “in-group” than about Canadians

Well, you can see how one thing can lead to another… so you should feel free to pursue this matter down any branch or pathway that catches your fancy. For example, there’s a lengthy and learned discussion on the origins of “Canuck” on the DCHP working pages (down at item 4.2 — damn the inability to drop a bookmark in to someone else’s site!) that will treat horses, Hawaii, hockey…