External links
The dictionary definition of spic at Wiktionary
Spic (or spick) is an ethnic slur used in the United States to describe Hispanic and Latino Americans or Spanish-speaking people from Latin America.
Some sources from the United States believe that the word spic is a play on a Spanish-accented pronunciation of the English word speak. [1] [2] [3] The Oxford English Dictionary takes spic to be a contraction of the earlier form spiggoty. [4] The oldest known use of spiggoty is in 1910 by Wilbur Lawton in Boy Aviators in Nicaragua, or, In League with the Insurgents. Stuart Berg Flexner, in I Hear America Talking (1976), favored the explanation that it derives from a mispronunciation by Spanish speakers of the phrase "I do not speak English," rendered as "no spik Ingles" or "no spika de Ingles." [5]
However, in an earlier publication, the 1960 Dictionary of American Slang, written by Dr. Harold Wentworth, with Flexner as second author, spic is first identified as a noun for an Italian or "American of Italian ancestry", along with the words spic, spig, and spiggoty, and confirms that it is shortened from the word spaghetti . The authors refer to the word's usage in James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, referring to a "wop or spig", and say that this term was never preferred over wop , and has been rarely used since 1915. However, the etymology remains. [6]
The dictionary definition of spic at Wiktionary