AFB        Niggers and Honkies

It is part of the English culture to be rude about foreigners.  And a foreigner is anyone who doesn't look like or sound like a White Anglo Saxon.  I don't now use the term "WASP" because we now reluctantly accept Catholics into our home territory.  My first wife was a catholic convert and although I am a dyed in the wool agnostic, I have to give my late darling wife every accolade that is within my capability.  I talk about Jeanne in another essay.

I have nothing against Niggers, it is not their fault that they are born black.  On both sides of the Atlantic the whites used to look down on anyone whose skin was not European white.  I expect that most blacks do not blame us whites for being born Honkies, either.

I suppose the modern legal framework is for the good in making it illegal to discriminate against another person on the grounds off his colour.  But try telling that to Robert Magabe.  But to call a black man 'a nigger', or a white man 'a honkie', is not discrimination.  Some cultures, like some Australians, can only be friendly by calling the other person by a rude name.  If an outback farmer in Oz wants to greet you in the local vernacular, he will probably slap you on the back with the words "How are you today you old bastard?".  If he greeted you with the words "Good morning Mr Smith", you'd know that you were in his bad books.  My first wife had a nun call her by a rude name and Jeanne responded with "Sister, that was very rude".  The nun's response was "If you can't be rude to your friends, who can you be rude to?".  There's enough sophistication in the English language, that there are polite ways of being very rude.

The origin of the word "nigger" is fairly certain: 'niger' is Latin for 'black'.  So 'nigger' is probably an Anglicisation of that word.  We can see that 'The Niger' area of Africa was  where a number of slaves came from to man the plantations of the southern North America.

But the probable origin of 'honkey' is more recent.  There are two contenders for the word.  One is said to be the name that the slave-owners were called by their workers.  In the slavery camps, it was observed that the black man's voice was often deeper than that of his master.  So some bright spark noted that the white masters had a voice that resembled the honking of a goose.

The other contender for the origin of the word 'honkey' comes from the 1920s.  At that time few blacks could afford a car.  A white man looking for a prostitute would go into the poor end of town and sound the horn on his car several times.  The local hookers soon learned what that meant; so did the black residents of the area.  The human race associated two things that occur at the same time, and leads to much of our folklore.  So when a black family heard a car horn, they referred to the diver (almost always white) as 'a honkey'.  This is the way language grows.