Spic

This article is about the ethnic slur. For the Cold War-era light tank, see Spähpanzer SP I.C. For other uses, see Spic (disambiguation).

Spic (also known as spick) is an ethnic slur used in the United States for a person of Latin American background.

Etymology

Some in the United States believe that the word is a play on their pronunciation of the English "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] These theories follow standard naming practices, which include attacking people according to the foods they eat (see Kraut and Frog) and for their failure to speak a language (see Barbarian and Gringo).

References

  1. ↑ http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/Dictionary/spic.htm Interactive Dictionary of Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.
  2. ↑ http://www.bartleby.com/61/53/S0635300.html The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.
  3. ↑ Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
  4. ↑ "spiggoty". Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. September 2005. (Subscription or UK public library 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.
  5. ↑ Take Our Word for It June 21, 1999, Issue 45 of etymology webzine. Accessed January 16, 2007.
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