"Wop" At McGill Leads to Censorship

University Orders Student Newspaper To Apologize

Friday April 16, 2004

On March 25, 2004, a student reporter wrote that actor Gil Bellows read an academic paper using "a wop accent." Bellows was attending a symposium at McGill University in Montreal held to promote and study the literary work of the late Canadian writer Mordecai Richler. The female writer for the McGill newspaper The Reporter was attempting to reproduce a satirical tone that might remind readers of novelist Mordecai Richler's acerbic style in his novel Barney's Version, a Canadian book that is very popular among certain Italian intellectuals.

But university officials took exception to the word "wop." They ordered the newspaper to apologize, to delete the offending article from the paper's web archives, and in all retrievable copies of the article to have the word removed. The story was reported in the Globe and Mail of April 14, 2004, page R3.

Italo-Canadians use the word 'wop' among themselves as a playful putdown. They are a bit edgy about non-Italians employing the term, as it is generally held to be a racist slur.

Like so many racist insults, the origin of the word is disputed. Suggested derivations include a totally false folk etymology, and two more likely sources.

 

FALSE SOURCE # 1

Several American dictionaries will tell you that wop is an acronym for "without papers" or "without passport," supposedly formerly stamped on the immigration documents of certain newcomers arrived from Italy. Una sciocchezza! Utter flapdoodle! Poppycock! Nonsense! In all the files of all the various names under which American departments of immigration have been known throughout United States history, there is no record whatsoever of the official issuance of such a stamp. No person has ever brought forward and presented as evidence a single immigration document stamped with such a phrase. Not once.

Be suspicious whenever you are offered a word origin involving a short form or an acronym. The illiterate and the unread don't seem able to imagine language being passed through history, so acronymic pseudo-etymology is often the only path they are able to posit. These are the folks who think that the f word (whose roots are at least 3,000 years old!) is an acronym representing in English "for undue carnal knowledge." What, one wonders, would be "undue" about the carnal knowledge of, say, animals and married persons. I don't put animals and marrieds together on purpose, by the way.

A plausible source of the word wop is the Spanish adjective guapo, pronounced approximately 'wopo' or 'hwopo,' depending on dialect. Its prime and sensuous meaning is 'beautiful' or 'handsome.' As a noun it came to mean 'dandy" or 'foppish male.' Then, says one theory I don't agree with (see why below), Spanish soldiers sent to Sicily took guapo meaning 'dandy' with them where the word entered Sicilian dialect as guappo. The word made its way north in Italy to become part of the dialect of Naples also. Italian guappo turned into a term of affection among Italian men who, when some of them immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century, carried the word to America as a term of male affection.

Then, says this theory, non-Italian Americans heard Italian men referring to one another by this term, so the Americans mysteriously first reverted to the Spanish spelling but made the word wop an insult for Italians in general. The last shift is particularly unbelievable. But this is the origin currently in favour with several of the large dictionaries of English. The earliest usage in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1912 and is spelled wap. One American dictionary of slang says the first printed version they can find spells it Spanish-style as guap and guapo. The next OED usage citation is for the year 1914, with the familiar spelling of wop.

The major fact against the Italian guappo is its pronunciation. Guappo is spoken as 'gwappo,' not 'wopo' in northern Italian dialects. The g is hard, the u is a 'w' sound. It is true that in southern Italian dialects guappo is pronounced 'wopo.'

Think of the Italian word for 'men who make up the watch,' guardia. It is pronounced 'GWARDya." The famous airport in New York city is not 'Lawardia,' is it? No, it's LaGWARDia. But we are to suppose that every single American listening to these Italian immigrants use their word guappo heard them say 'wopo' and not 'GWAppo.' That's unlikely.

The etymology that appeals to my knowledge of verbal transmission is the one propounded by most Spanish linguistic writers on the etymology of their own words and language. Their basic story is: it all happened in Spain. Guapo was first applied in Spain as an insult for Italian migrant grape workers in Iberian vineyards. Today Spain has more than one million "guest workers." Of course, the country has always HAD to welcome immigrant workers because of population scarcity and density fluctuations at various times in Spanish history. When the first large flood of Italian workers came to Spain at the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, Spanish men, with their notoriously sensitive machismo, thought very little of Italian males. Spanish women disagreed—as records of intermarriage attest. Spanish men dismissed Italian men as "los guapos," 'the pretty boys.' They were too handsome. They were pretty boys who had to be watched when they were around virginal and pure Spanish women. British and American residents and visitors to Spain heard Italian men being called guapos. That is the origin of wop that I find most cogent.

If written and printed proof mean anything, perhaps the American and British dictionary people might like to pay attention to the evidence gathered by Spanish etymologists. However it is notoriously difficult to get etymologies offered by non-British lexicographers into the sainted precincts of the OED or indeed for non-American linguistic discoveries to appear in Merriam-Webster dictionaries of English.

To return to the word in the news that prompted my rantlet, you the reader must decide if McGill Univeristy should rush around squawking about slurs and censoring what appear to me to be reasonably innocent student newspaper errors, mistakes of youthful enthusiasm, not racism.

Bill Casselman

© 2005 William Gordon Casselman