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#WHATSCRACKER CRACK#

Georgia Cracker label depicting a boy with peachesīefore the Milwaukee Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta, the Atlanta minor league baseball team was known as the ' Atlanta Crackers'. The other finalists, in order of finish, were Statesmen, Rebels, Tarpons, Fighting Warriors, and Crackers. From a list of more than 100 choices, Seminoles was selected. In 1947, the student body of Florida State University voted on the name of their athletic symbol. Descendants of crackers are often proud of their heritage.

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Many slaves and free blacks joined the Seminoles and found work in the cattle business.

#WHATSCRACKER CRACKED#

Late 19th century cattle drivers of the southeastern scrub land cracked whips to move cattle. Virginia squatters) added, 'we select the black members of a litter for raising, as they alone have a good chance of living.' In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin quotes a Professor Wyman as saying, 'one of the 'crackers' (i.e. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, 'cracker' is used informally by some white residents of Florida and Georgia (' Florida cracker' or ' Georgia cracker') to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations.įrederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that 'some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated.' 'Cracker' has also been used as a proud or jocular self-description in the past. Usage Meliorative and neutral usage įurther information: Georgia cracker, Florida cracker, Culture of the Southern United States, and Redneck 'Soda cracker' and even 'white soda cracker' have become extended versions of 'cracker' as an epithet. The idea has possibly been influenced by 'whitebread', a similar term for white people. Hence the people who cracked the whips came to be thus named.Īnother possibility, which may be a modern folk etymology, supposes that the term derives from ' soda cracker', a type of light wheat biscuit which dates in the Southern US to at least the Civil War.

The whips used by some of these people are called 'crackers', from their having a piece of buckskin at the end. According to An American Glossary (1912): Whips were also cracked over pack animals, so 'cracker' may have referred to whip-cracking more generally. It has been suggested that white slave foremen in the antebellum South were called 'crackers' owing to their practice of 'cracking the whip' to drive and punish slaves. Ī 'cracker cowboy' with his Florida Cracker Horse and dog by Frederic Remington, 1895 This possibility is given in the 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, but the Oxford English Dictionary says a derivation of the 18th-century simplex cracker from the 19th-century compound corn-cracker is doubtful. The compound corn-cracker was used of poor white farmers (by 1808), especially from Georgia, but also extended to residents of northern Florida, from the cracked kernels of corn which formed a staple food of this class of people. 'We don't know what to do with these crackers - we tell them to settle this area and they don't we tell them not to settle this area and they do'īy the early 1800s, those immigrants 'started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor' as is the case with other events of linguistical reappropriation. The label followed the Scotch-Irish American immigrants, who were often seen by officials as 'unruly and ill-mannered' The use of the word is further demonstrated in official documents, where the Governor of Florida said, I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers a name they have got from being great boasters they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode. This usage is illustrated in a 1766 letter to the Earl of Dartmouth which reads: The word was later documented describing a group of 'Celtic immigrants, Scotch-Irish people who came to America running from political circumstances in the old world'. 1595) 'What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?'

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The historical derivative of the word craic and its meaning can be seen as far back as the Elizabethan era (1558-1603) where the term crack could be used to refer to 'entertaining conversation' (one may be said to 'crack' a joke or to be ' cracking wise') The word cracker could be used to describe loud braggarts An example of this can be seen in William Shakespeare's King John (c. The word crā̆k was later adopted into Gaelic as the word craic meaning a 'loud conversation, bragging talk' where this interpretation of the word is still in use in Ireland, Scotland, and Northern England today. The term is 'probably an agent noun' from the word crack.

The exact history and etymology of the word is still up for debate.

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