![]() And now that I know where it comes from, I feel pretty horrible about how cavalierly I've tossed it around in the past. Of all the phrases on this list, I have probably heard this one used, and used it myself, more than any of the others. Here are five common phrases used in Western culture that have some seriously messed-up, racist backgrounds. However, that's not an excuse to keep from learning and thinking about what the things we say really mean, and the cultural baggage attached to them. So we can forgive ourselves for not knowing the history of every single word and phrase we use. ("Slut" and "queer" are two such terms.)īasically, English is a tricky language, and I think anyone who speaks it understands that. And sometimes, more happily, the opposite happens, and once-bigoted phrases are reclaimed and used in positive ways by the very groups they were intended to marginalize. Sometimes a perfectly innocuous phrase can be utilized by racists for their horrible agenda, tainting it. Sometimes a word's troubling origins are forgotten. And sometimes, this means that certain terms and phrases can change their meaning over time. Of course, the nature of the English language (or any language, really) is that it's almost constantly changing. Over time, we forgot about those definitions, and have gone back to using the phrases as usual - but when we do so, we're carrying their secret racist history with us. While that's horrible, it's also not the end of the story - many common phrases we use every day, which did not have initially racist origins, were then repurposed to have racist meanings somewhere along the line. But what I didn't know until recently is that in the U.S., a lot of our most popular phrases have racist origins. Of these there are the following kinds: a black rat and a grey rat, a py-rat and a cu-rat.Have you ever used a common phrase, one you've heard a thousand times before, and suddenly wondered, "Where did that expression even come from, anyway?" I know I have. _-rat, "person who frequents _" (in earliest reference dock-rat) is from 1864. To smell a rat "to be put on the watch by suspicion as the cat by the scent of a rat to suspect danger" is from 1540s. Specific sense of "one who abandons his associates for personal advantage" (1620s) is from the belief that rats leave a ship about to sink or a house about to fall, and this led to the meaning "traitor, informant" (1902). (in surnames) to persons held to resemble rats or share some characteristic or quality with them. But these are simply larger and smaller species of the same genus, very closely related zoologically, and in the application of the two names to the many other species of the same genus all distinction between them is lost. The distinction between rat and mouse, in the application of the names to animals everywhere parasitic with man, is obvious and familiar. ![]() Applied to rat-like species on other continents from 1580s. ![]() The common Middle English form was ratton, from augmented Old French form raton. Klein says there is no such connection and suggests a possible cognate in Greek rhine "file, rasp." Weekley connects the English noun and the Latin verb with a question mark and OED says it is "probable" that the rat word spread from Germanic to Romanic, but takes no position on further etymology. American Heritage and Tucker connect Old English ræt to Latin rodere and thus to PIE root *red- "to scrape, scratch, gnaw," source of rodent (q.v.). Perhaps from Vulgar Latin *rattus, but Weekley thinks this is of Germanic origin, "the animal having come from the East with the race-migrations" and the word passing thence to the Romanic languages. ![]() In its range and uncertain origin, it is much like cat. Similar words are found in Celtic (Gaelic radan), Romanic (Medieval Latin ratus, Italian ratto, Spanish rata, Old French rat) and Germanic (Old Saxon ratta Middle Dutch ratte, Dutch rat German Ratte, dialectal Ratz Swedish råtta, Danish rotte) languages, but their connection to one another and the ultimate source of the word are unknown. "a rodent of some of the larger species of the genus Mus," late Old English ræt "rat," a word of uncertain origin. ![]()
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