This may seem kind of stupid but I am kind of stupid, is there a list somewhere of phrases that are stupid or insensitive racially or gender biased?
I just got up from conversation with a couple of older black men, that I said "well I got to go back to work and start cracking the whip." And it occurred to me then that it was probably a really insensitive stupid thing to say.
Sadly, it hadn't occurred to me until it's already said.
You are viewing a single comment
I always thought “Indian summer” sounded very poetic, maybe related to the climate of the Indian subcontinent.
But it’s just garden variety American racism?
That’s so disappointing!
Does anyone know more about the etymology?
Indian summer (n.)
"spell of warm, dry, hazy weather after the first frost" (happening anywhere from mid-September to nearly December, according to location), 1774, North American English (also used in eastern Canada), perhaps so called because it was first noted in regions then still inhabited by Indians, in the upper Mississippi valley west of the Appalachians, or because the Indians first described it to the Europeans. No evidence connects it with the color of fall leaves, or to a season of renewed Indian attacks on settlements due to renewed warm weather (a widespread explanation dating at least to the 1820s).
Source: Etymonline
That’s not so bad!
I followed up the etymology of “zipper head” above so I was prepared for waaaaaaaaay worse.
That's so interesting. Like @vzq I had the wrong sense of the word "Indian" - I thought it was something the British came up with after they colonized India.
Well, and specifically, it's related to the concept of an Indian giver: The warm weather is "taken back" and impermanent.
Not so much an etymology, but how it was used in pop culture:
Our local paper used to publish a cartoon and poem every fall. The piece was called Injun Summer, and it was printed every October from 1907-1992.
It's very much a relic of its era, which is to say "it was weird; really fucking weird." The image is lovely. The text is an old man telling a young boy a totally made up story. It's folksy, wistful and nostalgic. It talks about the past and how native spirits (literally ghosts) return to the land each fall. It's also written in the vernacular of what an old man in 1907 might sound like.
Personally, I don't think the complaints about racism were what caused them to stop printing it. I think it was the weirdness that just didn't appeal to anyone under the age of 50 (in 1992!).
The fist link shows the image with text. The second shows how it would have looked in print.
http://www.sewwug.org/images/injun\_summer\_2.pdf
https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-history-of-john-t-mccutcheons-1907.html