DCHP-2

wop Wop DCHP-2 (November 2016)

• n. — Ethnicities, derogatory, extremely offensive

  an ethnic slur referring to people of Italian background.

  Type: 6. Memorial — Wop is a derogatory term used to refer to people of Italian descent. OED-3 (s.v. "wop" (n.2A)) labels the term as being from the US but the term was unfortunately also pervasive in Canadian English, as evidenced by the many Canadian citations available throughout the 20th century. COD-2 (s.v. "wop") and ITP Nelson (s.v. "wop"), as well as OED-3, DARE (s.v. "wop"), DA (s.v. "wop"), W-3 (s.v. "²wop") and AHD-5 (s.v."wop"), cite the Italian word guappo, meaning "bold" or "bully", as the possible origin of the term.

  See also: crawfish  

  • The term is included for reasons of historical accuracy and completeness. It is not intended, as clearly indicated in the usage labels "derogatory" and "extremely offensive", as a term for current use or a term, meaning or usage that is in any way condoned.

  • 1933  The Chief brought him into the treatment room of the hospital. As I stood by his side watching the doctor treat the wound, I overheard the Chief Keeper using the vilest kind of language to the poor, demented creature, blaming him for everything that had happened and hoping they could soon ship him off to Italy, where all the "wops" belonged. 
  • 1948  One little Italian boy went home in tears and rebellion because he was Italian and his boy playmates called him a wop. "And what's the matter with wops?" asked his mother calmly. "Ask that boy who discovered America?" That helped a lot. 
  • 1964  "They work hard here for 30 or 40 years to gain respectability and acceptance, and as soon as people stop calling them Wops, they get hit by 150,000 uneducated southern Italians, whom they despise anyway and who endanger their whole social position." 
  • 1978  The word ethnic is of purely Canadian coinage, if I am not mistaken. It did not appear until after the last war when the mosaic-fiction was invented. The word derives from the Greek, and means the heathen-world in New Testament usage. Before that covering term was adopted, the present-day ethnics were labelled according to their national origin as wops, krauts, bohunks or with similar endearing terms. 
  • 1987  Over the years, Hansard has recorded a number of unfortunate remarks by Conservative MPPs, the most famous being Ed Havrot's reference to the "wop show" while Italian-Canadian members of the Legislature were speaking. 
  • 1995  On the strength of his "illegal'' adaptation of Wiliam Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which ran two performances at Stratford and gave Del Grande and his spear-carrier buddies a chance to shine, he got a directing job there. And, he adds casually, because of a Wop Go Home sign he'd seen in the immigration office, he called himself Louis Thompson in those days. 
  • 2006  Dino was shouting at my little Ojibway boys, "You guys are wops!" At once, I told him he mustn't use that word. "It's a nasty word that some people call Italians," I explained. 
  • 2014  First Nations people know the experience only too well, as do Latinos and blacks. I grew up in a time when Italians were routinely referred to as wops, Frenchmen were frogs, Chinese were chinks and the English were limeys (or, to my Oz friends, Pommy bastards).