There may be some debate abut the etymology of the phrase “w*p”,” did it come from the Italian phrase “guappo” or was it an acronym for “With Out Papers,” in the identical method that the phrase “cop” was an acronym for for “Constable On Patrol?” As Ben Zimmer says on this Atlantic article:
The perfect guess from etymologists is that the supply is a southern Italian dialectal phrase, guappo or guappu, that means “dandy” or “swaggerer.” That, in flip, is probably going from the Spanish phrase guapo that means “good-looking” or “daring,” imported to Sicily when the island was occupied by Spain. Sicilian immigrants to america introduced the swaggering phrase with them. It “connoted conceitedness, bluster, and maleficence entwined,” wrote the music journalist Nick Tosches in his 2001 e-book The place Lifeless Voices Collect, in a historic exploration of the Italian-flavored pop-music style as soon as often called “wop songs.” Right here is how Tosches describes (with some literary embellishment) the way in which that guappo and its variants grew to become wop on American shores:
It was these Sicilian phrases that have been generally used to explain the work-bosses who lured their greenhorn paesani into servitude in New York Metropolis within the early years of the 20 th century. In New York and different American seaports, the lowly labor of the Italian immigrants’ servitude—the dockside toil and offal-hauling that others shunned—got here to be referred to as … guappu work; and finally the laborer himself, and never the boss, was often called guappu. The peasant immigrants’ tendency to clip the ultimate vowels from commonplace Italian and Sicilian—as in paesan’ for paesano—rendered guappu as guapp’, which was pronounced, roughly, as wop.
Regardless of the origin of the phrase, “w*p” got here into use as a racial slur that functioned to different the southern Italian ethnic group within the USA. In 1882, the New York Occasions posted an article titled Our Future Residents, writing:
“There has by no means been since New York was based so low and ignorant a category among the many immigrants who poured in right here because the Southern Italians who’ve been crowding our docks in the course of the previous 12 months.”
This was the social local weather during which the phrase “w*p” grew to become prevalent.
Sicilians have been typically on the nucleus of anti-Italian hate. For instance, this NYTimes article for 2019 How Italians Turned ‘White’ describes the trope of Sicilians as “rattlesnakes.”
“A scabrous Occasions editorial justified the lynching (of Italians) — and dehumanized the useless, with by-now-familiar racist stereotypes.
“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who’ve transported to this nation the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest with out mitigations. Our personal rattlesnakes are pretty much as good residents as they. Our personal murderers are males of feeling and the Aristocracy in comparison with them.”
The editors concluded of the lynching that it could be troublesome to search out “one particular person who would confess that privately he deplores it very a lot.”
To study extra in regards to the historical past of anti-Italian racism within the USA, we strongly counsel this text How Italians Turned ‘White.’
