Ah, semantics........and thank you
for giving me the nudge to look further........."Cracker," the old standby of Anglo insults was first noted in the mid 18th century, making it older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of "whip-cracker," since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip (not to mention the other brutal arenas where those skills were employed.) Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition, (in some instances, was used in reference to bandits and other lawless folk.)
But it turns out cracker's roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least.
"The meaning of the word has changed a lot over the last four centuries," said Dana Ste. Claire, a Florida historian and anthropologist who studies, er, crackers. (He literally wrote the book on them.)
Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator."
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ ... n-crackers
Here's an actual road sign that marks the historical Cracker Trail all the way through Central Florida. I didn't know the Crackers came from farther up north originally. I wonder why they got their own highway here in Florida?
