Longtime Hatter Martin Langeveld writes me as follows:
In the Dutch edition of Wikipedia, I came across this article about “locofaulisme”, the Dutch term for a nickname or insult for the inhabitants of a particular place or area. The article speaks only about Dutch and Flemish instances, and includes a link to a list of such terms which is quite extensive. Most of them are intended to be humorous, of course. For example, in Amsterdam and elsewhere “stoepeschijters” (stoop shitters); Ijmuiden “vissekoppen” (fish heads); Schiedam “jeneverneuzen” (gin-noses); Eindhoven “keienschijters” (bouldershitters); Vlissingen “flessendieven” (bottle thieves). (There are a lot of dialectical ones I can’t translate.)
These nicknames extend even to the smallest villages and hamlets — I first came across the term here on the page about Texel, the island where my family is from. In order, the village nicknames listed there translate to fingerbiters, sandbellies, stoopshitters, shitpullers, stonethrowers, spitters/barleybellies, cake-eaters, plumpers.
US instances might be things like the Wisconsin cheeseheads, Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, etc., as well as the amorphous “Yankee,” the definition of which depends on your point of view. (The old joke being that to a Southerner, a Yankee is a Northerner. To a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander, a Yankee is an old Vermonter. To an old Vermonter, a Yankee is one who eats apple pie for breakfast. To the old Vermonter who eats apple pie for breakfast, a Yankee eats it with a knife.)
But is there an English word that’s equivalent to the Dutch “locofaulisme”? The obvious English version would be locofaulism, but the very few instances Google supplies of that spelling all refer back to the Dutch term. Also, are these insult names as ubiquitous in any other countries, or is this a particularly Dutch practice?
I don’t know of an English equivalent term, but of course there are such terms everywhere, and they are definitely a fit topic for Hattic discourse. (According to Dutch Wiktionary, the Dutch word is only attested from 1988 onwards, which seems oddly late.)
I suppose the word would have a ph, like “ethnophaulism”, but Google doesn’t find “locophaulism” (as I type).
Re 1988 being late, “locofaulism” is a pretty high-falutin’ label, so maybe the phenomenon was called something else before that or it simply wasn’t a phenomenon that was perceived as needing a standard label.
Are there Dutch examples based on slight sound change (from the normal demonym) for derogatory wordplay, parallel to the AmEng “Rethuglican” for “Republican” (and other political examples with different valence or direction, of course)? Or https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jew_Yorker?
Kusaal Kambʋŋ “Ashanti person” and its cognates elsewhere in Western Oti-Volta are often said by the speakers to contain bʋŋ “donkey” as the second element. (The attitudes of northerners to the Ashanti are not straightforwardly positive.)
I’m pretty sure that’s just a pejorative folk etymology (another thing for which there seems to be no snappy name.) But like the great majority of Ghanaian ethnonyms, its actual etymology is mysterious.
Yes, but in this density – like for every village on the not terribly large island of Texel – they may be a more specifically Dutch phenomenon after all.
True.
Britain has monkey hanger for people from Hartlepool, and Wikipedia has a long list. I can’t think of any in the U.S. for anything smaller than a state.
dysphemonyms?
Reminded of part of a story by Diane Duane.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041012203930if_/http://www.owlsprings.com/bears.htm
There’s another wrapper to the Yankee onion, of course – to anybody outside the US (and particularly the British and the Mexicans, I think?), a Yankee is any USian.
¡Cuba sí! ¡Yanqui no!
Reminds me of The Onion.
Excellent! (Paul Sadecki should be a Dutchman.)
Re the Onion link, I had lunch in Vandalia just last week, after passing through St. Elmo on the way (not to mention the awesomely-named Teutopolis a bit further ENE). I should have stopped and asked the locals in St. Elmo what their derogatory nickname for Vandalians was.
Vandals, every one, natch.
I have a suspicion that a British cousin of Paul Sadecki is responsible for the list that Jerry Friedman linked to. I was born in Abingdon, whose residents are allegedly called Abos, and grew up in nearby Wallingford, which is said to be the home of Wallies and Wally-Farts. I have never heard of any of these silly names. Most of the rest of the list seems similarly puerile, especially the absurd acronyms
Wandering through Wikipedia, this topic led me to the town of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, QC.
(Proximately, through the list of reduplicated placenames, which also includes the Hhohho region of Eswatini.)
to anybody outside the US (and particularly the British and the Mexicans, I think?), a Yankee is any USian.
Yes, Yanqui is used in Mexico and throughout Hispanic America but I find that, among Mexicans, yanqui is often used in print and other media while something like gabacho is more used in conversation (at least where I visit, and among Mexicans/Mexican-Americans north of the border.)
I also find that gringo gets used self-deprecatingly by learners of Spanish, as in threads in message boards titled “How do I not sound like a gringo?”
In Santa Barbara, natives will sometimes jokingly call ourselves Santa Barbarians.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
Wandering through Wikipedia, this topic led me to the town of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!
Mentioned here, of course. Twice.
This bloody town’s a bloody cuss
No bloody trains, no bloody bus,
And no one cares for bloody us
In bloody Orkney.
The bloody roads are bloody bad,
The bloody folks are bloody mad,
They’d make the brightest bloody sad,
In bloody Orkney.
All bloody clouds, and bloody rains,
No bloody kerbs, no bloody drains,
The Council’s got no bloody brains,
In bloody Orkney.
Everything’s so bloody dear,
A bloody bob, for bloody beer,
And is it good? – no bloody fear,
In bloody Orkney.
The bloody ‘flicks’ are bloody old,
The bloody seats are bloody cold,
You can’t get in for bloody gold
In bloody Orkney.
The bloody dances make you smile,
The bloody band is bloody vile,
It only cramps your bloody style,
In bloody Orkney.
No bloody sport, no bloody games,
No bloody fun, the bloody dames
Won’t even give their bloody names
In bloody Orkney.
Best bloody place is bloody bed,
With bloody ice on bloody head,
You might as well be bloody dead,
In bloody Orkney.
[Me, I visited Kirkwall long ago and liked it.]
“Don’t fear heaven, don’t fear earth, but fear Wēnzhōu people speaking Wēnzhōu language.”
天不怕地不怕就怕溫州人說鬼話 (where 鬼話 is ‘ghost language’)
“Zurchers are supposed to be moneymad and grasping” — they are a bit too punctual, in my experience of Swiss television stereotypes.
My grandfather had a nickname for every nearby town. My cousin was working on some archeological sites between current Sandanski and current Petrich (closer to Petrich), from the fourth century. A lot of it was about people from those two towns insulting each other. I’ll give a cite in half an hour.
ISBN 2367-5640
Need to clean up after dinner, talk to you later.
I just remembered talking to a friend who grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula. He said that as teenager he and his friends had insulting nicknames for many or all the small towns in that area. He told me a few, of which I only remember Pathetica for Pacifica.
As someone who’s both from Texel and born on Texel (pronounced Tessel), I think these weren’t terms we used back in the ’90s anymore, although I have a vague familiarity with some of them. On that note, Martin ommitted that on Wikipedia it says people who weren’t born on the island are known as Helder crows. This is also a bit outdated because I’m a minority. Most people going back decades now were born in the hospital in Den Helder. It also says that people not from Texel call us islanders jellyfish, but at least nowadays that’s just a regular Dutch insult so I’m not sure if the othersiders still use that. (Only an othersider would say mainlander.)
According to Van Dale it’s an English word, loco- “place” + foul + -ism, found since 1988. I believe that insofar as it’s a real word it’s restricted to dialectologists, and even those seem to prefer regular words like schimpnamen (sobriquets). But in short, it’s jargon.
Thanks to living in the future, we can just read that 1988 citation, Een drooggevallen beerput: locofaulismen, F. Jansen, right here on DBNL.
@David
I think just about every village here in Antwerp where I live now has a nickname as well. Antwerp city being fatnecks (pretentious), Boom dog eaters, Lillo crab catchers, Bornem knife fighters, etc.
Note that the 1988 source linked above states the following:
@Frans: “I’m a minority” — is that normal now? Not “I’m someone who people perceive as a member of a minority group”? It seems quite weird. Also ungrammatical, but that’s beside the point.
I’ve been seeing it increasingly often.
To me, “minority”, as it refers to groups of people, is a mass noun.
“Soccer helps you get rid of most of the aggression you build up in soccer.”
– Ephraim Kishon (my translation of the German translation from memory)
David Marjanović: “a chess computer distinguished by the spoken comments it would make during a game” hah.
Hello fellow Texelaar Frans! ( I would have been born there except post WWII housing was hard to come by and my parents ended up living temporarily in Soest.) If your family goes back a few hundred years on Texel, chances are we are related.
Google is currently in Halloween mode, and Google Translate turns the above into “I fear nothing except the ghost stories that the people from Wenzhou tell”.
Крушите са добре, предполагам 🙂
@V @Frans: “I’m a minority” — is that normal now?
Distinguish
(a) “be in the minority” [WRT whatever adhoc classification is under discussion]
(b) “be a member of a minority social group” [a permanent classification recognised by most of the society]
I interpreted Frans as an ESL way of saying (a) [a minority of Texel residents were born and breed there].
My impression is that some Americans have recently started using “minority” in sense (b) “member of a minority social group” while others find this sloppy or even disrespectful.
My point was that the word “minority”, as it pertains to people other than WASPS seems to have shifted from default plural to default singular, or something?
Sorry, you know what I’m talking about, too tired to get the details.
some Americans have recently started using “minority” in sense (b) “member of a minority social group” while others find this sloppy or even disrespectful.
yes indeed, but recently as in mid-20thC (and maybe earlier). and yes, deprecated in many circles, even more than other such abstract-nounings (“what does the Negro want?”; “there was a Vietnamese in my class”; etc).
rozelle: some Americans have recently started using “minority” in sense (b) “member of a minority social group” while others find this sloppy or even disrespectful.– I find that extremely strange. I’m not US-ian, but I have US friends, some of which have lived in Bulgaria for almost 20 years.
Plenty of results for e.g. “student who is a minority”, many referring to the writers themselves or their relatives.
I read “I’m a minority” as “I belong to a small minority. I may even be alone”.
@V
An “in” seems to have disappeared when shuffling some things around, that’s all.
The sitcoms Cheers and Scrubs both have scenes where a North European character envying an Italian or Latina character says “I wish i was ethnic”.
@Martin
Hi there. 🙂 My ancestral family is European (Dutch/Belgian/French/German) but as far as my surname goes that’s Zeeuws. My parents grew up in Rotterdam; they moved to Texel in the ’70s.
@mollymooly
That would be shameful. In any case, in Dutch the grammar is identical here. You’re either in a minority or part of a minority.
@V
Also note the Green Day song Minority: “I want to be the minority / I don’t need your authority.”
Frans: “An “in” seems to have disappeared when shuffling some things around, that’s all.”
That’s the problem. Hm, an insertion of an “in” might make it better. But the problem I perceive is that the word “minority” has become an opposite of a plurale tantum.
EDIT: I wrote a lot after that but it got deleted. Not Steve’s fault.
It hasn’t replaced it. Both “x is a minority” and “x belongs to a minority” are unremarkable.
although there is such a thing as Swamp Yankee (that is, descendents of Mayflower or at least relatively early Puritan Boston colonists who are not particularly wealthy and might even be considered poor), in my family we always sort of ignore them for the sake of the joke about Yankees (and in fact, some relatives’ relatives *are* Swamp Yankees, so what does that say)? We do, however, extend it to Boston Brahmins, and it’s the Brahmins who say that Vermonters are the Yankees, not themselves.