[In 1996 I published Words Apart. Dealing with the language of racial abuse, it ventured down what was a problematic path, though, as things would soon turn out, nothing like as hedged about with trap and ambush as it would become. The concept of political correctness existed, but it was not required to make clear that the book’s contents were often distasteful. But while the single review praised the work, albeit noting that it might better have been left unwritten, today’s overt cultural censorship implicit in what is known as ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, was yet to rear its head. Stereotypical abuse aside, I soon found that everything is up for negative exploitation. Food, physique, religion…for this excerpt I’ve opted for a sample of the given names, always useful ammunition when it comes to racial abuse.]
Metonymy, the substitution of a name for a quality, thus making the one stand figuratively for the attributes of the other, is common in racial abuse. It is the smart version of that elbow-in-the-ribs knowingness epitomized by Monty Python’s ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean, say no more...’. Paddy and Mick, Izzy and Abe, Hans and Fritz. Say no more indeed. There may (or may not) have been a French procurer called Alphonse, but, rhyming slang (on ponce) aside, this quintessential French name tells us all we need to know. Thus it is across the terminological board.
Naming, whether positive or negative, is a selective process. While the best-known of such names carry with them a weight of historical, ideological and sociological baggage, some almost escape the net. Or if caught, offer but a few sorry specimens. Only the countries and nations with the longest and best-charted histories (justifiably or not) have attracted a substantial lexicon. Thus one must lump together those others for whom vilification has been less sizeable. That said perhaps it is true, in this context if no other, that lucky indeed are the nations that have no history.
Johnny Bono
Before passing to names taken from and thus attributed to specific nations, it is worth considering one of the most popular of English formations, the use of Johnny, combined with a given national name. Now confined largely to the ageing denizens of the golf club bar, such expressions have a lengthy pedigree. Its earliest use, ironically, was of rather than by Englishmen, and as noted by Lord Byron among others, was the term used around the Mediterranean by those who, bereft of any greater linguistic sophistication, attracted British attention by cries of ‘Johnny!’. This version of the word gradually came to mean an idle and vacuous young aristocrat, and subsequent to that anyone seen as relatively ineffectual but well-meaning. Somewhat different meanings developed in such combinations as Australia’s Johnny Raw: a new immigrant, and America’s Johnny Reb, a supporter of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Johnny, an abbreviation of Johnny Darby in England (from the slang darby: a handcuff) and John Hop (rhyming slang for cop) in Australia, also meant a policeman.
As far as its application to foreigners is concerned, the earliest use of John or Johnny would appear to be the early 19th-century John Chinaman, a term that may have come from the use of the popular British name John as a catch-all name for the Chinese interpreters who dealt with the first merchants. The term spread throughout the empire, and was as popular in Australia as in England.1 It was still cited, without comment, in the 1970 edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, but seems to have been quietly excised since.2 Slightly nearer home John Company (an English translation of the earlier Dutch Jan Kompanie) had meant the East India Company3; the idea, at least in Dutch eyes, was to personify the traders as the servants of one great overlord - Jan Kompanie. By the mid-19th century, native soldiers, otherwise known as Sepoys, who were enlisted in the British Army in India were known as Johnnies, as were the Ghurkas, the Nepalese troops of Hindu descent. Johnny Turk, perhaps the best known of all these expressions, and now used only as a joke, emerged during the Crimean War of 1854, while Johnny Greek and Johnny Arab (pronounced a-rab) are early 20th-century terms. A later engagement, Allenby’s 1917 campaign in Palestine, renamed the Turkish troops as jackos. The Arabs, like the Greeks, also used johnny to describe the British. Onion sellers from Brittany, rarely seen in contemporary Britain, though the traditional image of onion-bedecked bicycle, beret and striped Breton shirt lingers, if only in nostalgic advertising, were known as johnnies or onion-johnnies up to the 1960s. Last, and somewhat anomalous is Johnny Bono which, while sounding Italian, actually refers to an Englishman, and meant literally ‘Johnny Good’ (foreigners being naturally ‘bad’) in the late-19th-century East End of London, where it presumably sprang from the Italianate lingua franca.
Proud as Cuffy
Among the many names used as shorthand for a Black person, the oldest are probably a group taken from the African day-names - handed out according to the day on which one was born - that came from a range of West African languages (typically Twi and Fante, found on what is today’s Ivory Coast) and that accompanied slaves on their trip west. The majority of these names imply a lack of sophistication, a rough and tough rural sensibility that seems naive and gauche in town. Why this should be so is unknown, but may reflect the social gap, found in the West Indies, between the Creoles, those actually born in the islands, and the saltwater negroes, slaves who had been born before or during the voyage from Africa.
The foremost among these is Cuffy, which as Kofi was the Twi name for a boy born on a Friday. Adopted into English around 1710, the name lasted until the late 19th century, and developed the alternatives cuff and cuddy. Used among fellow-Blacks to denote an unsophisticated, tough peasant, its use in English tended to be patronizing, especially in the phrase proud as cuffy, meaning conceited and puffed up, and calling up what to White eyes was the ludicrous image of a Black man dressed up in his best clothes. Blacks had a different take on the name and perhaps the most famous of all Cuffys, the leader of the Guiana slave rebellion of 1763, is now a national hero of the renamed country, Guyana. Kojo refers to the Fante Kodwo and thus Ghanaian Kodzo: a male child born on a Monday, while quashie or quashee (1840s onward) or squasho comes from the Twi Kwasi: a boy born on a Sunday. While making the usual connection with agrarian naiveté, quashie was also used by White sailors to mean any Black colleague. Quashiba, a foolish, uncultivated woman, comes from the Twi akwasiba: a girl born on a Sunday.
Not all of these terms are used in a White-to-Black context. The West Indies used cubba, from Cuba: the day-name of a woman born on a Wednesday, to mean a promiscuous woman or an effeminate man; quaco, another take on the countrified, ignorant person, is based on the Twi kwam: a boy who is born on a Saturday, while quaw, quamin or quarmin, all meaning much the same, but with the added meaning, in context, of an albino, is based on the Twi kwaw: a boy who is born on a Thursday.
Moving from Africa to America, one finds Rastus, a ‘typical’ Black name (presumably from the formal Erastus), especially as applied to the happy, dancing, servile Black as seen in so many early movies. Rastus’ female companion was Liza or Lize and there was, at one time, a spate of ‘Rastus and Liza’ jokes, most of which turned on the couple’s stereotypical stupidity. Lize, however, was by no means an exclusively Black metonym. Thanks to the hackery of one Edward Judson, a political fixer and bullyboy who as the author ‘Ned Buntline’ created virtually single-handedly the myths of what would become known as the ‘Wild West’, she also stood for the predominantly Irish ‘Bowery g’hals’ (the apostrophe denoting an ‘Oirish’ pronunciation), those tough denizens of downtown New York City whose fictional exploits, alongside her boyfriend the Bowery ‘b’hoy’ Mose, and their friend Syksey (a possible hat-tip to Dickens’ Bill), delighted mid-19th century New Yorkers. Dressed to the nines (a multi-layered calico dress, a parasol and a poke bonnet) she, like her fireman paramour (beaver hat, gaudy kerchief, baggy pantaloons and red shirt), smoked cigars and spent her days and nights in brawling and boozing.
Fiction, of an ostensibly higher class, was also responsible for another Black name: Huck, from Huckleberry Finn, the hero of Mark Twain’s eponymous novel, published in 1885. Jim abbreviates Jim Crow (see Animals) while the much more recent Jackie Robinson (used in the 1940s/50s by Blacks of Blacks) referred first to any Black person who became the first to gain entry to a given profession and latterly to the penis. (Other Black pioneers have been termed firsts: the first person to break into an occupation, or blockbusters: the first Black family onto a hitherto all-White block; the term was reversed when the era of gentrification saw White families moving into the former all-Black ghettoes.) Given that the Jackie Robinson in question was the first Black star to break through the formerly segregated world of major league baseball, one might assume that the secondary meaning is a nod to the baseball bat. Other names include James, Juba, Leroy, Mandy (for women), Willie (also used in Australia by Native Australians to describe Whites) and Marcus, from the Black leader and ‘back-to-Africa’ advocate, Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). Female equivalents include Sunshine, Summertime and Sapphire, best known as a character in America’s Amos and Andy radio show, a once-popular but now infinitely non-PC creation, which, with its White actors faking it as dumb but happy darkies, was one of the last re-interpretations of the old ‘minstrel show’.
It is the minstrel show, now barely possible to conceive, but one of the mid-late 19th century world’s most popular forms of entertainment, that inspired Aunt Jemima, a classic ‘mammy’ figure, whose image was popularized by the song ‘Old Aunt Jemima,’ published around 1876-7 and later reinforced by the ‘Aunt Jemima’ brand of pancake mix. Both uncle, aunt and auntie have all been used, usually for older men and women. Uncle Remus, the creation of writer Joel Chandler Harris, is another ‘happy darky’.
Nic Frog
The most interesting of the Dutch names, which include Nic Frog (short for Nicholas and dating from an era when the Dutch, rather than the French, were ‘frogs’) is Hogan or Hogan-Mogan. This term, usually applied to rich and powerful figures, comes from the word Hoogmogendheiden, literally ‘lord high mightinesses’ and is, in the end, a simple mispronunciation. Coined in 17th-century England and thenceforth used contemptuously for the Dutch it came to mean any grandee or high and mighty person, used either humorously or contemptuously. It was also used as an adjective, to describe strong drink or as hogan mogan rug, strong drink itself. Other names include the surname Knickerbocker, originally that of one of New York’s oldest Dutch families, and thus applied to all descendants of the New York Dutch, and Closh (or mynheer Closh: ‘Mr Klaus’), properly Klaus and itself an abbreviation of Nicolaas, a favourite given name.
Lewis Baboon
Johnny, usually applied to a given national name, here gives Jean, France’s equivalent of John and thus applied to any Frenchman. Jacques Bonhomme, literally John Goodman, is another all-purpose Frenchman, though generally a farmer or farm-worker, while another ‘Frenchified’ term is Lewis Baboon, the direct, and somewhat less flattering response to the concept of John Bull meaning an Englishman (and coined, like Nic Frog, in the same essay - ‘Law is a Bottomless Pit’ (1712) - by Dr John Arbuthnot; see John Bull, below). The Lewis presumably refers to the long line of French kings named Louis. Such ‘baboons’ were especially popular as caricatured peasants, typically during the French Revolution. The late-19th century saw a brief flowering of the Royal Navy slang Jimmy Round, a ‘name’ which J. Redding Ware, in 1909, suggests comes from the French phrase Je me rends: I give up. Whether this idea extends beyond British nautical arrogance cannot be proved. Finally Alphonse, the rhyming slang for ponce or pimp, can also mean a Frenchman. The same term, with the same implications, can be found in a variety of European tongues.
Hans-in-Kelder
As far as these terms are concerned there are two primary varieties of German: those called Fritz and those called Hans. Fritz, a diminutive of Friedrich (Frederick), can be found in the late-19th century, when in a letter of 1883 George Meredith compared ‘Fritz’ to ‘Alphonse’, but emerged properly during World War I, when as well as a German soldier, it meant a German shell, aircraft, submarine or anything else pertaining to the German side of the hostilities. It was also found as Fritzy, as Fricy, in Russian, and as Freddy. In Poland fryc meant a gullible sort of person, while frycowa, literally ‘to befritz’, meant to dupe, to make a fool of someone. The mainly American phrase on the fritz: out of order, working sporadically, emerged in 1929, but may not actually relate to the name. Instead it may be an onomatopoeic version of the sound of sputtering, shorting electricity, or even a euphemism for ‘fuck’ (as in fucked up or all to fuck, meaning out of order). That said, another phrase, put the fritz on, meaning to spoil, destroy or put a stop to, was coined in 1903 and would seem to have some connection to Germany, perhaps to the clichéd stiff-necked obduracy with which Germans (or at least Prussians) are credited.
Hans, Germany’s other name, first appears in England during the 16th century. The equivalent to John or the Dutch Johannes it meant either a German or a Dutchman. During the 17th and 18th centuries it was probably best-known in the phrase hans-in-kelder (Hanschen im keller in German), meaning literally ‘Jack-in-the-cellar’ and translated as a foetus or unborn child. Hans the grenadier paid tribute to German soldiering, while hans-wurst or simply wurst (‘Hans-sausage’) used the national taste in charcuterie to characterize a ‘typical’ German. Like Fritz, Hans gained wider use during the 20th century’s two World Wars, and was joined in the second by Heinie, a diminutive of another popular name, Heinrich (Henry); its Polish version is Hanysek.
Other German names include Greta, Gretchen, a Polish borrowing that means ‘a frivolous girl of easy virtue’, cousin-Michael (on the pattern of England’s cousin-Jan, meaning a Cornishman) that translates the German der deutsche Michel, to mean the (German) peasantry and Hohenzollern. This term, used to indicate Germany’s autocratic spirit and belligerent policies refers to the Hohenzollern dynasty, a family originating from Hohenzollern in southern Germany which became successively electors of Brandenburg, kings of Prussia, and emperors of Germany. Finally Piefke, used in Austrian slang as a nickname for any German, is based not so much on a single name but on many, pointing up the way so many Prussian surnames seem to end in some harsh, cacophonous syllable.
Mulligan Stew
St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, may or may not have converted the entire country single-handed, explained the Trinity through the shamrock (now Ireland’s national flower) and rid the country of its snakes - all of which legends accrue to his memory - but one legacy brooks no argument: his name. Patrick, in the forms Pat and Paddy, has generated a large number of metonymic terms, all of which mean Irishman or, in combination, denote some form of ‘Irish’ activity.
Pat, the simple abbreviation, appears around 1780 on both sides of the Atlantic. Within the next decade come Patess, an Irishwoman, Patland, Ireland, and Patlander an Irishman. Although the OED appears to deny such a background, claiming ‘origin unknown’, patsy, meaning a fool or sucker is surely another version of pat, and is based the stereotype of Irish stupidity. Its first use is cited in 1903 and it was soon well enough known for Harpo Marx, complete with prototype red wig and playing alongside his brothers Groucho and Gummo, to appear on the American stage in 1911 as ‘Patsy Brannigan’, a stock vaudeville character: the dumb Irishman.
Even more popular than Pat is Paddy, which reflects the Gaelic form of Patrick: Padraic. A paddy, among other things is a nickname for the ruddy duck (possibly through the ruddy complexion and red hair of many Irishmen), but that use is a by-product of a far larger and more pointed vocabulary. The word appears first in 1780, when it is used by Arthur Young in his Tour of Ireland and became well-established, once more in Britain and America, as the 19th century proceeded. The legendary Irish loquacity gave the Irish phrase come the paddy over: to hoodwink, to bamboozle, while the employment of many immigrant Irish as manual labourers made paddy itself synonymous with a bricklayer or his hod-carrier. Paddy, meaning a tantrum, comes from the reputation of the Irish as short of temper and quick to take offence. (The same word has been used in prison slang to mean the padded cell in which prisoners who have in some way ‘done their nut’ are confined; however one must acknowledge a parallel root: the word padded itself.) More recently, at least in Black America since the 1940s, paddy has meant a White man (as have paddy-boy, patty, patty-boy and White-paddy) and thus a policeman (given the large numbers of Irishmen who have always been drawn to the big city forces). This link between the Irish and the police can also be seen in shamus (c.1925) whether a uniformed policeman or detective (and even more commonly a private detective), which comes from Seamus, a common Irish name and usually pronounced as such, for all that Humphrey Bogart persists in ‘sharmus’ in the film of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Variations on shamus include chom, chomus and sham. Similarly ‘Irish’ are shamrock (the national emblem) and muldoon (a common surname). Today’s gangsta rappers keep the tradition going, characterizing today’s officers as O’Malley.
There are many combinations based on Paddy (Irish itself is good for 101 combinations). Most take the alleged naiveté or stupidity of the Irish as their touchstone. Thus for sailors Paddy’s hurricane (or an Irish hurricane) is a flat calm, an Irish battleship or Irish man o’war is no more than a barge, Irish lace is a spider’s web, Irish mahogany the common elder, Paddy’s lantern the moon, and Paddy(’s) lucerne (in Australia) a type of shrub - the tropical evergreen, Sida rhombifolia - so prolific as to be a pest (whereas lucerne is a form of clover, much used as animal fodder). To do Paddy Doyle, in British army slang, is to serve time in the punishment cells and the paddy wagon, which of course welcomes in any race or creed of prisoner, is the police van or ‘Black Maria’. A Paddy Wester is either a second-rate, incompetent seaman; or a fake seaman with a dead man’s discharge papers. The latter term comes from one Paddy West, a notorious boarding-house keeper in 19th-century Liverpool, who sold fake seamen’s papers to thousands of otherwise unqualified men. Paddyism is an Irish peculiarity or ‘Irishism’. In Australia paddy’s market was originally the weekly market for cheap or secondhand goods held in the late-19th century near Haymarket Square in Melbourne; it propgressed to mean any kind of cheap market and during World War II also the market in Cairo where Australian troops sold illegally manufactured goods, black market commodities and the like. A Paddy funeral referred to any boisterous party (from the drinking traditional at an Irish wake, which, when not serving its literal purpose, means any boisterous, noisy event) and like patland, Paddyland meant Irish and Paddylander an Irishman. A Paddywhack is a large and threatening Irishman or the thrashing he is deemed capable of admistering to those who fall foul of his temper; the military phrase what paddy gave the drum is, unsurprisingly, a thrashing.
Patrick aside, Michael is another typically ‘Irish’ name and michael, mick(e)y or particularly mick have meant Irish since the mid-19th century. The term originated in America, where it soon extended its range to become a generic for the Roman Catholics (who at that time were still predominantly Irish - Italians and Eastern Europeans began arriving somewhat later in the century). This Catholic link means that mick can also mean a Mexican. Mick has come to mean the penis too, for instance in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), although this may be less of a tribute to Irish manhood than a parallel naming to that used in John Thomas or dick. Mick(e)yland, inevitably, has been used for Ireland, while the disparaging verb to mike, meaning to loiter comes either from mouch (which most probably comes from the Old French muchier: to hide or skulk) but, as Hotten notes, may be another case of racial stereotyping: Irish labourers were seen as congenitally idle. To take the mick(ey): to tease, however, has no Irish background; it is simply rhyming slang: to take the Micky Bliss, i.e. to take the piss. On the other hand a Mickey Finn or Mickey Flynn, a knockout drug, possibly chloral hydrate, mixed into an unsuspecting victim’s drink, certainly is Irish. Or at least the man who created it was. The original Finn was a saloon-keeper who ran the Lone Star and Palm Saloons in Chicago c.1896-1906; acccording to his story he had picked up the recipe from voodoo operators in New Orleans.
Mulligan, a well-known Irish surname, has its own stable of terms, at least in America; all seem to have originated around the turn of the 19th century. The best-known is Mulligan stew, an old hobo or tramp term that describes a makeshift stew made of whatever meats and vegetables are available and the usual meal in the hobo jungles of the 1930s. This generated the mulligan car: the railroad car from which meals are served, the mulligan joint: a cheap restaurant (from joint, meaning small restaurant or caf<@233>) and mulligan mixer, a Western term meaning cook. The US Army’s mulligan battery was the cook wagon, mocking the standard battery’s more bellicose activities. Mulligan, on the same lines as shamus and paddy, can also mean a prison guard, another group who at one time tended to be recruited from the immigrant Irish. The New York stage of the 1870s, or at least its more down-market venues, saw the enormous popularity of a series of ‘Mulligan plays’, created by the talented song-and-dance duo Ned Harrigan and Tony Hart. These plays - among them The Mulligan Guard Ball and Mulligan’s Silver Wedding - were the direct descendants of the ‘Mose and Lise’ Bowery productions mentioned above, mixing themes dear to Irish immigrant hearts, with a solid leavening of contemporary ‘dirty realism’, using plenty of local colour and sometimes drawing their plots from the well-documented machinations of New York politics. Irishry aside, Harrigan and Hart’s work is the bridge between the rough-hewn burlesques of the mid-19th century and the increasingly sophisticated ‘musicals’ that would dominate the early 20th and beyond.
If Pat, Paddy and Mick stole the honours for the men, then Bridget, and her diminutive Biddy was the quintessential Irish girl. Grose cites ‘Biddy, or Chick-a-biddy, a chicken, and figuratively a young wench’ in 1785, but the equation between Biddy (or Bridget) as the typical Irish serving maid or charwoman comes fifty-odd years later. Biddy and Bridget play much the same role, although only Biddy has lasted into the present day, in meaning an interfering, irritating old woman. A less common term is bridgeting, extinct by 1918, which in its time meant a confidence trick whereby money was extorted from these often gullible girls, who turned over their wages in the belief that they were helping some Irish Republican cause. Mullingar, a place rather than personal name, gives the derogatory Mullingar heifer: a girl with thick ankles an d thus the phrase beef to the heels, like a Mullingar heifer. Both come from the supposed physique of Mullingar women.
A few other names also relate Ireland to the names of its people. Among them are the surnames Donovan and Murphy (also used widely to mean a potato, a ‘staple’ Irish food) and dogan, which is also presumed to be a name. They are all generic for Irishman, as is New Zealand’s doolan, which can also mean a Catholic. So too is Mac, from the Gaelic ‘son of’ and the prefix of many Irish surnames, while Teague, usually found in the context of Roman Catholicism can also be used in Teagueland and Teaguelander. Bark, from a number of northern English dialects, means an Irishman, and Barkshire is Ireland. The reason remains elusive, unless it comes from the idea of an Irishman shouting or ‘barking’. Proper names give Ted and Teddy, from Theodore, and tip, an abbreviation for Tipperary (and best known as the nickname of Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neil, the American politician). Finally the Anglo-Irish shoneen, from the Irish Gaelic Seonin, a diminutive of Seon or John, refers to a person born and living in Ireland, whose allegiances - cultural, political, even sporting - are predominantly directed against England.
Thus, c. 1900, Australia’s cabbage-John, an itinerant Chinese vegetable seller and his contemporary the vegetable-John.
China repaid the favour with bono Johnny, a positive pidgin term for a British sailor, lit. a ‘good John Bull’.
Griffins, or newcomers to the Company would have met the rum johnny or Ram Johnny, an Indian man who attached himself to a newly arrived colonial, offering help and expecting recompense; it was apparently an alteration of the personal name Ramazani. Helpful, perhaps, indispensable, even, but privately scorned. As versified in Tom Raw, the Griffin (1828): Ram-Johnnies are blood-suckers, arrant leeches, / Discarded servants, exhibitioners, / Always prepared, with broken English speeches, / To act as tongue to new and raw practitioners / [...] / Premeditated rogues, established hummers. / Who prowl round Ghauts, the houses of provisioners / And taverns, ready to entrap new comers.
I've been called a Plastic Paddy for having citizenship via Foreign Birth Registration!