Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Food and smell 189
comb is when one ‘combs one’s hair with one’s fingers’; a Welsh pearl is a
‘counterfeit pearl or one of inferior quality’; a Welsh cricket is a ‘louse’.
There are many more examples – French Pie ‘a type of stew’, Jew Butter ‘a
dripping made of goose grease’ and German Duck, which in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries referred to ‘half a sheep’s head boiled
with onions’ (or alternatively was slang for ‘bed bug’). Irish grapes, lemons,
apples and apricots were all once used for ‘potato’; Irish cherry was a sneer
term for ‘carrot’. Nigger candy was the name given to a nineteenth-century
lolly made of hard black licorice (later renamed chocolate baby), and around
that same time were also dishes such as niggers in a snow storm (stewed
prunes and rice) and nigger-in-a-blanket (a dessert made of raisins in dough).
On the other hand, black waiter’s lingo from that same period has terms like
burn the British (‘toasted English muffin’), and in-group names like nigger
steak (‘liver’), nigger and halitosis (‘liver and onions’). Pope’s/parson’s nose
denotes the fatty tail of a cooked chicken and is reputed to have originated as
a slur on Catholics during the reign of James II (1685–8).
Increasingly, it seems, food and drink are featuring in racial and ethnic
slurs. Whereas early racial abuse displayed strong moral stereotyping (often
with religious overtones), in modern times it plays much more on superficial
characteristics to do with appearance and dietary habits. 32 Abuse terms show
a rich exuberance of racial insults based upon food. Most of the expressions
are extensions of the names for the food items stereotypically associated
with each group. Here is just a small sample: frog and frog-eater ‘French
person’; kraut and krauthead ‘German’; cabbage-eater ‘German or Russian’;
macaroni, spag, spaghetti, spaghetti-head, spaghetti-bender, spaghetti-eater
‘Italian person’ (giving rise to spaghetti western ‘cowboy films made cheaply
in Italy’); frijole-guzzler, beaner, bean-eater ‘Mexican’; ricer, rice-eater
‘Chinese’ (to which we can add the Australian slang term RGB ¼ rice gobbling
bastard ‘Asian person’); french fries or snow frogs (‘Québecois’, in
Canada); potato-head, potato-eater ‘Irish person’ (also potato-fingered
Irishman for ‘clumsy person’); leek ‘Welsh person’. The Scots, like the
Dutch, are celebrated for being thrifty, and a Scotch fillet is a cheaper cut
than other fillets. It seems that the English mind has long connected the
Dutch with dairy products, and labels like butter-mouth, butter-bag and
butter-box meaning ‘Dutchman’ date back to the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The Scots have been known to refer to their English neighbours
as pock-puddings or poke-puddings, referring to a kind of boiled pudding
(from Scots poke ‘sack’). There is also the label limey for ‘English person’,
which has its origins in the early practice of English sailors eating limes as
a protection against scurvy. Related nicknames include lime-juice, limejuicer
and lemon-eater; also Limeyland used by Australians to refer to ‘the
mother country’.