The Etymology of The Insult “Wop”
News Headlines: "Wop" At McGill University in Montreal Leads to Censorship
University Orders Student Newspaper To Apologize
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.
Acronyms Play A Very Small Role in Etymology
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.
Most acronyms in English are of very recent vintage. Acronymic short-forming in English did not rocket into the stratosphere until the Second World War and then chiefly among the American and British martial word-coining classes. Most abbreviations were created to lend a false air of superiority and spurious importance to the most mundane of military happenings. "Sergeant, Private Pertz is AWOL. Find him ASAP. Or it's SNAFU.” (Situation Normal, All Fucked-Up)
Now, at the onset of the twenty-first century, when clear, fluid and bountiful language is everywhere under attack by the minions of compression, acronyms are pandemic, infectious and pestiferous. Indeed, far from speeding up written and spoken communication, acronyms are for the most part a hindrance to comprehension. Is that QC or RF? Quite Clear or Rather Foggy.
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 highly 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 haved rushed 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
© 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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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
