For people who want to yell about whether or not the word hillbilly is offensive. I won't be participating. Have fun.
You know what, I'm just going to post my stance here so I don't feel tempted to share it later:
I am a Polish person. We're targeted by the word 'polack', which is a corruption of the Polish word for a Polish man 'polak'. I'm inclined to think of it as an ethnic pejorative rather than a full-fledged ethnic slur, because it lacks the severity of 'sp*c' or 'g**sy'. Non-Polish people using it to describe themselves (eg, people from /pol/ calling themselves /pol/acks) bothers me. Very rarely I might use it against a fellow Polish person (eg, to a polish nazi sympathizer: "You know what you are to them? A g!*&+$n Polack! So far as they are concerned, you are an inconvenience squatting on their land! They would take all your possessions, take your land and your house and then either kill you or throw you in a concentration camp. That's what nazism actually is.) but when non-Polish people use it it annoys me.
To me, hillbilly seems to be on a similar level of severity, so I can see why a descendant of Scots-Irish immigrant may be bothered by the dismissive use of the word.
Hillbilly has experienced a semantic shift towards a more general application that hides the anti-Scots-Irish history, but the stereotype and basic idea of the word is the same. This is the same type of semantic shift that happened to the word 'g**sy' outside of areas in which Romani people usually live. The word is still extremely hurtful to Romani people.
So yeah that's my onions.
Sorry about this. I just wanted to get the off-topic argument out of my thread. I figured I'd make a thread for it here so people can get it out of their system.
Hillwilliam to you, sir!
From what little I know, Hillbilly and other derogatory terms for poor rural whites often have their roots in conflict between big business and labor. Especially in areas like Appalachia, where mining companies wanted to portray the locals as sub-human in order to take land, pay low wages, and get away with all manner of exploitation.
Hell, my mother still calls me her "little Kraut bastard." My friend Jake used to always look at me and say, "There was a Jew in the woodpile somewhere!" I've been called all kinds of slurs for "white" by East Asian friends. I'm unabashedly a city guy -- from New York, no less -- and MAN do some of my Texas friends rib me for that. No skin off my nose, from any of them. But somebody I don't know? They had best keep away from that kind of thing.
The offense taken from regional, ethnic, and racial slurs is usually in inverse correlation to the closeness of the relationship to the person using them. Witness the lyrics in rap songs, if nothing else.
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Hell, my mother still calls me her "little Kraut bastard." My friend Jake used to always look at me and say, "There was a Jew in the woodpile somewhere!" I've been called all kinds of slurs for "white" by East Asian friends. I'm unabashedly a city guy -- from New York, no less -- and MAN do some of my Texas friends rib me for that. No skin off my nose, from any of them. But somebody I don't know? They had best keep away from that kind of thing.
The offense taken from regional, ethnic, and racial slurs is usually in inverse correlation to the closeness of the relationship to the person using them. Witness the lyrics in rap songs, if nothing else.
This mad me think of (NSFW) this.