"You people"

Ann Romney's dismissive “we’ve given all you people need to know” has gone viral, I read. On Daily Kos, you get this response:

I don't know about you, but where I come from, that's called high falutin' and condescending. I wonder if her nose was in the air when she said it? No video accompanies.

Well, I'd call it much worse than that.  I can't hear the phrase 'you people' today without instantly getting racist overtones or something related. (Here, it's classist.) Good old urbandictionary.com gives the classic story of Ross Perot using a very similar phrase before the NAACP, including this:

Willie Clark, president of the N.A.A.C.P. branch in San Bernadino, Calif., said the overall tone of Mr. Perot's remarks and particularly his use of the phrase "your people" reflected how culturally out of touch he was with his audience.

The reaction to Ann Romney's comment could well be in good measure due to the fact that it reinforces the notion that she, and they, are culturally out of touch with their audience, namely the American people.

But I'm actually left wondering about the history of this phrase. It's cleared risen in written usage, according to the Ngram below, for American English (click to embiggen).

I poked around in a bunch of the early attestations and where they were ghosts (mostly where 'you' ended a sentence and 'people' started a new one), the early ones mostly look like they're just addressing some group of people. By the 1970s, you can find some, but ever there it's hardly so clear. Anybody know when the modern meaning got established?

(Image of the t-shirt from here.)

What's up with 'uppity'?

I'm guessing you know by now that Rush Limbaugh has called Michelle Obama "uppity" and that he was defended by Glenn Beck. A new piece on the AtlanticWire by Elsbeth Reeve starts with this:

A lot of people have no idea that the word "uppity," when applied to black people, has racist connotations, but it's getting harder and harder to understand how public figures, in particular, are able to maintain their ignorance of the term's history. President Obama has been a well-known public figure for several years and his conservative critics, in particular, keep making the "uppity" mistake. 

Gee, it's hard for me to read this even as ironic. That there might be an American English speaker who doesn't know it's racist. Maybe. I know a lot of clueless people, nobody that clueless. But can you even choke out a joke about Limbaugh and Beck not knowing exactly what they're doing? I didn't think so.

Still, there's a question in here about language use. My sense is that people don't use the word uppity much anymore except in highly ironic ways. So, I did a quick NgramViewer check on it and a set of words with closely related meanings, namely: haughty, presumptuous, conceited, arrogant. Here's the result (click to embiggen):

If you go to the NgramViewer and play around, say with shortening the time depth to 1950 or so, you'll see that uppity has actually increased in frequency, though it's stayed relatively low, compared to the others. In fact, everything else but 'arrogant' has declined over time. (Why the other words have declined is a whole nother question.)

What would account for the uptick in uppity? A simple google search didn't shed any light but I happened to try an Ngram for uppity women and uppity woman. It was about the only collocation I could come up with that sounded like anything you might hear. The result:

If you google those, you get the goldmine I didn't find with a simple(r) search. It turns out, then, that it's not just an ironic use of the term, but a kind of 'taking back' of a once-negative phrase.

The last word on 'articulate', almost literally

Imus/Maledicta followup

Well, in the course of a busy day (but a good busy, largely), and in between reading the fine comments from the Ridger and Ben Zimmer on the latest post, I had a conversation with a colleague who's attuned to matters of race and language. He praised Reinhold Aman for clarifying blunders in translation of Imus's slurs in the international press, but raised a question:

What was the appropriate target for a translation here?

He rightly points out that how Imus understood the word ho and how young African-Americans understand the word are almost surely different. Aman is clearly aware of that, but is taking the latter interpretation as the one that's relevant for translation. Building on that, I figure, Aman's use of Waiwa, the Bavarian equivalent of German Weiber (roughly 'broads'), for ho may well be giving Imus too much credit: For all we know, Imus was assuming 'prostitute'. Do you translate Imus's intent or the language he was crudely trying to ape? Translating nappy as 'diaper' might be just plain stupid, but it gets tougher once you get beyond that. I guess to be really accurate, you'd need to gloss both meanings and explain the mismatch.

Even as I type this, I'm listening to Jon Stewart's rerun from April 30 with "Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore, who builds a nice routine around a distinction between ethics and efics. "Looking fresh" is a part of the latter that Larry wants to stress. Race and language is a topic that's everywhere today.