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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.

Etymology and history

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 "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]

References

^ "SPIC". Archived from the original on 2008-10-12. Retrieved 2008-11-07. Interactive Dictionary of Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.
^ "Spic. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000". Archived from the original on 2007-11-18. Retrieved 2007-04-13. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Accessed April 12, 2007.
^ Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
^ "spiggoty". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.) citing as an etymology Amer. Speech XIII. 311/1 (1938) 'Spiggoty' originated in Panama during Construction Days, and is assumed to be a corruption of ‘spikee de’ in the sentence ‘No spikee de English’, which was then the most common response of Panamanians to any question in English.
^ Take Our Word for It June 21, 1999, Issue 45 of etymology webzine.
^ Wentworth, Harold, and Flexner, Stuart Berg. The Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960, pp. 507.