spic
{{short description|Ethnic slur against people from Spanish-speaking countries}}
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{{About|the ethnic slur|the Cold War-era light tank|Spähpanzer SP I.C.|other uses}}
Spic (or spick) is an ethnic slur used in the United States to describe Hispanic and Latino Americans or Spanish-speaking people from Latin America.
Etymology and history
Some sources from the United States believe that the word spic is a play on a Spanish-accented pronunciation of the English word speak.{{cite web |url=http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/Dictionary/spic.htm |title=SPIC |access-date=2008-11-07 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081012234617/http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/Dictionary/spic.htm |archive-date=2008-10-12 }} Interactive Dictionary of Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.{{cite web |url=http://www.bartleby.com/61/53/S0635300.html |title=Spic. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |access-date=2007-04-13 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071118225946/http://www.bartleby.com/61/53/S0635300.html |archive-date=2007-11-18 }} The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. The Oxford English Dictionary takes spic to be a contraction of the earlier form spiggoty.{{OED|spiggoty}} citing as an etymology Amer. Speech [https://www.jstor.org/stable/451348?seq=2 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. 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," both Spanish ways of informing a speaker that you can not speak English).[http://takeourword.com/Issue045.html Take Our Word for It] June 21, 1999, Issue 45 of etymology webzine.
However, in an earlier publication, the 1960 Dictionary of American Slang, written by Dr. Harold Wentworth, with Flexner as second author, spic is first identified as a noun for an Italian or "American of Italian ancestry", along with the words spic, spig, and spiggoty, and confirms that it is shortened from the word spaghetti. The authors refer to the word's usage in James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, referring to a "wop or spig", and say that this term was never preferred over wop, and has been rarely used since 1915. However, the etymology remains.Wentworth, Harold, and Flexner, Stuart Berg. The Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960, pp. 507.
See also
References
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