Crakka, sometimes white cracker or cracker, is a usually term designated for white people,[1] especially in the Southern United States. However, it is sometimes used in a neutral or positive context or self-descriptively with pride (see Florida cracker and Georgia cracker).[2]
Etymology
The etymology of the term "cracker" holds that foremen in the antebellum South used bullwhips to discipline Enslaved Afrikans, with such use of the whip being described as "cracking the whip." The white foremen who cracked these whips thus became known as "crackers."[3][4][5] Contemporary sources suggest, however, that it was not slaves but pack animals over which the whips were "cracked."[6][7]
"The whips used by some of these people are called 'crackers', from their having a piece of buckskin at the end. Hence the people who cracked the whips came to be thus named."[7]
Another whip-derived theory traces this term from the Middle English cnac, craic, or crak, which originally meant the sound of a cracking whip but came to refer to "loud conversation, bragging talk".[8] In Elizabethan times this could refer to "entertaining conversation" (one may be said to "crack" a joke) and cracker could be used to describe loud braggarts; this term and the Gaelic spelling craic are still in use in Ireland, Scotland and Northern England. It is documented in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"[9][10] This usage is illustrated in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth which reads: {{quote|"I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode."
Notes
- ↑ Cracker Definition from the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary
- ↑ Ste. Claire, Dana (2006). Cracker: Cracker Culture in Florida History. University Press of Florida.
- ↑ Smitherman, Dr. Geneva (2000), Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner, Houghton Mifflin Books, 100.
- ↑ Herbst, Philip H (1997), The Color of Words: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States, Intercultural Press, 6z1.
- ↑ Major, Clarence (1994). Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. Puffin Books. ISBN 0-14-051306-X.
- ↑ Buckingham, James S (1842), The slave states of America, Fisher, Son, & Co., 210.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Thornton, Richard H (1912). An American Glossary. JB Lippincott., 218-219.
- ↑ Dolan, T. P. (2006). A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. Gill & MacMillan. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-7171-4039-8
- ↑ * Shakespeare, William (2008) [1989]. Braunmuller, A. R. (ed.). The life and death of King John. Oxford World's Classics. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953714-3.
- ↑ Wedgwood, Hensleigh (1878). A dictionary of English etymology. Macmillan & Co.