120 replies to this topic

[Walter]

You'd better know, you're a 6th generation cracker on your mother's side. I once dated a beautiful latin lady who told me she believed the term applied to any anglo. Interesting, since you don't have to be anglo to be a cracker and most anglos aren't.

[ScubaHawk]

I get a twofer
Peter Gabriel did have an eyes song- "In Your Eyes" 80's soft rock.
And since I am certainly a cracker, as well as an armature etymologist I know what a cracker is:


Pop Quiz:
That slang term "Cracker" originally meant:

A: Cattle Drivers cracking their whips on cattle drives.
B: Slave Owners
C: A braggart or boaster
D: Someone who cracked their corn, instead of taking it to the mill.

Answer (in white): C - From the Gaelic

[annasea]

OK, if that's what it ORIGINALLY meant, what does it mean NOW?

[annasea]

Well, I think I may have answered my own question.

My always helpful urbandictionary.com has 102 definitions.

[Dennis]

A believe that the term "Cracker" today means that you are a descendant of a ranching family. Or if you are a "Florida Cracker" you are a Floridian and can track your ancestry back to when the Florida ranchers used whips to drive the cattle. Florida is still one of the major beef producing states. I assume "Georgia Crackers" mean something similar.

My definition concurs with #36 on the list of definitions for cracker.

A person with at least three generations of Floridian ancestry from one or both sides of the family. It originated from the few groups of people that lived in Florida before proper settlements began, when men would herd cows through the miles and miles of palmetto bushes, cracking their whips to keep the herd moving in the right direction.

Since I am one, I never even thought about there being a racist definition to the term. Interesting.

Edited by Dennis, 30 August 2005 - 11:35 AM.

[ScubaHawk]

I'm not sure how far I would trust that dictionary.
The slang usage of "cracker" in the last century was used by Afro-Americans as a derogatory term for white people. It is also used as slang for the poor "rednecks" of S. Georga and N. Flordia. Digging out some of my slang encyclopidia, here are some insteresting quotes:

"The original root to be the Gaelic craic, still used in Ireland for 'entertaining conversation.'"

The English meaning of cracker as a braggart appears by Elizabethan times, as, for example, in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this . . . that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?"

from a letter to the earl of Dartmouth [1760]: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode." The word then came to be associated with the cowboys of Georgia and Florida, many of them descendants of those early frontiersmen.

It even has suggested reading:
Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South

[BabyDuck]

i mean it in the 'gone with the wind' sense of someone too poor to own slaves who had to (horrors!) work their own land. my granddaddy was a sharecropper.

[Walter]

i mean it in the 'gone with the wind' sense of someone too poor to own slaves who had to (horrors!) work their own land.

That was almost everyone. In the antebellum south, slave owners were in the minority. Most of those who did own slaves, owned very few and worked their land together with their slave or slaves. While the large plantation with hundreds of slaves and the idle owner did exist, it wasn't as common as is now commonly believed.

[CaptSaaz]

Dude... the EYES on the women on this board definitely have it. I especially have a certain fondness for one particular green-eyed lady. 

DO TELL! Enquiring minds want to know.

Well, several people on the board know who I mean but we have decided to let the cat out of the bag...

Starfish Sandy has gotten a job here in New York and has moved in with me this past weekend. We did this with the promise that when I retire in about 6 years, we move back to Texas.

[finGrabber]

Woo!!Hoo!!

ya'll must be on cloud 9!

[AliKat]

Congratulations. Hope all went well with the move.

[Walter]

Congratulations to you both.

[Marvel]

Congratulations!

[fairfield59]

Dan and Sandy,
Great news! And here I thought it was just a Cozy thing!

[dustbowl diver]

Best of luck to both of you!!!!!!