"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

September 30, 2005

 

Mr. Casselman,

Forgive me if I come late to this etymological dispute, but I was doing a search for Neapolitan etymology and came across your site today. As an amateur linguist (and a Neapolitan), I must point out to you, that to assert that Neapolitan (as well as Southern Italy dialects) do not pronounce the word guappo as wappuh (to use non-scientific transliteration) is absurd.

Neapolitan, like French and English is written to reflect etymology not necessarily pronunciation. We pronounce guarda' as warda' (accent on last syllable). The gua- comes typically from words of Arabic as well as Frankish/Gallic origin (like guallara from Arabic wadara) and transliterates the wa- / va- sound. Some Southern dialects inland from Naples pronounce the word vapp' and vuarda'.

The final -o in many words is either dropped, or pronounced as a final French e. I applaud your efforts to dispel ignorance and racist attitudes, but scholars outside Italy should be aware of the last three centuries of linguistics and etymological work done by Italians, in Italy.

Unfortunately, as you yourself point out, much of this material is still only available in Italian. I welcome any comments or response you may wish to make. And thank you again for your very insightful piece which was very much needed.

You are welcome to incorporate any or all of the information into your pages. I am a lawyer and play with words all day, so you can understand my fascination with meaning and derivation. Keep up the interesting work and dialogue. You are right about misleading ignorant folk etymology. This problem occurs in France and Italy as well. There are debates about Spanishisms and Gallicisms and whether their ancient Arabic roots came directly to Southern Italy or via the Spaniards and French in the 1500 to 1700's.

Dating the entrance of Greek words into Italian is also subject to populist folk etymologists who have argued over the last one hundred and fifty years that such words come directly from ancient times and are somehow more noble and authentic. They sometimes speculate about ancient customs and beliefs to create origins. But modern scholarship has shown that many Greek words came to Italy as late as the 1200 and 1300's with waves of Greeks fleeing the Turkish and Arab expansion. Sometimes words from Germanic languages are misattributed to ancient Latin words which are similar only in so far as they are both from the Indo-European family, again in efforts to explain and offer ancient authenticity.

Distinti saluti & Regards,

Carlo Sant'Elia

 

Dec. 27, 2006

Dear Mr. Casselman,

I'm Fabrizio Costantini from Rome, Italy. I've read your article about the origin of the word wop in your Wording Room.

You say not to believe in the origin from the Italian guappo because of the hard g at the beginning of the word: the pronunciation should be gwappo, you say, and you're right, but that's the polite Italian pronunciation. In Naples dialect (a lot of Italian migrants were from Naples ) the pronunciation is wappe, so I think that the Italian origin theory should not to be discarded.

Regards,
Fabrizio Costantini