Kim Pearson

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GREASER

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. a. U.S. slang. ‘A native Mexican or native Spanish American: originally applied contemptuously by Americans in the south-western United States to the Mexicans’ (Cent. Dict.).

1849 G. F. RUXTON Life Far West 4 The Greasers payed for Bent's scalp, they tell me. Note, The Mexicans are called ‘Spaniards’ or ‘Greasers’ (from their greasy appearance) by the Western people. 1872 C. KING Mountain. Sierra Nev. vi. 113, I thought them not worse than the average Californian greaser. 1883 B. HARTE Carquinez Woods vii. 154 note, GreasersCalifornian slang for a mixed race of Mexicans and Indians.
 
 attrib. 1855 FRANK MARRYAT Mount. & Mole Hills xiv. 263 The term ‘greaser camp’ as applied to a Mexican encampment is truthfully suggestive of the filth and squalor the passing traveller will observe there. 1888 Century Mag. Oct. 836 The cowboys..fairly stormed the ‘Greaser’that is, Mexicanvillage
 

b. An objectionable person; a sycophant. (Cf. GREASE n. 5b.)
 
  1900 J. S. FARMER Public School Word-Book 100 Greaser,..a cad. 1911 D. COKE Wilson's vii. 74 Dick could not help wondering..what possible breach of House discipline could brand a fellow as a beastly greazer. 1958 Spectator 7 Feb. 163/1 The dismissive contempt the little greaser had so richly earned. 1959 I. & P. OPIE Lore & Lang. Schoolch. x. 191 Grease is a very popular word in school just now, and seems to be short for ‘greaser’i.e. sycophant, soft-soaper, teacher's pet.

  c. A term applied, orig. in California, later elsewhere, to long-haired youths who, as members of a group or gang, ride about habitually on motor-cycles (in California, in ‘hot rods’).
 
  1964 San Francisco Examiner 26 Jan. I. 14 The boy distinguished..‘the Surfers’..from less-favored individuals called ‘Greasers’, who indulge in such gauche activities as drag-racing, putting grease on their hair, smoking marijuana and dancing the Twist. 1965 Sun 8 June 7/7 You can call rockers Greasers if you like... Greasers just means they have to put a lot of work into bikes. 1969 Guardian 23 Sept. 5/1 The London Street Commune..intends forming a ‘working coalition between greasers, skinheads, and beats’. 1970 Daily Mirror 31 Mar. 24/4, 200 teenagersboth skin-heads and ‘greasers’, who are long-haired youthsfought for two hours with bricks and chains. 1971 Daily Tel. (Colour Suppl.) 3 Sept. 41 The surfers used to refer to the hotrodders neither as hotrodders nor as Hair Boys, but as ‘greasers’. 1971 It 7-21 Oct. 21/3 From the very start he seemed bound for Angeldom, leading a young pack of greasers down Leyton Baths on a regular basis and battling with the Mods.
  

From other sources:

2. Slang A tough young man, especially one from a white working-class background who is much involved with motorcycles or cars.
3. A Mexican (-1848); coll. Since ca. 1860.

-similar to grease ball. A foreigner (-1920); a very lowly, especially if unclean, tramp (-1929); a garage or machine-shop assistant (-1925).

4. Mexican or Latin-American, loosely any Latin or similar person, esp. of the

laboring class.

 

In Unkind Words, Irving Lewis Allen questions whether, "greaser or greaseball, which have been applied to a variety of Mediterranean and Latin American groups, refer to the heavy use of oil and fat in cooking or to the popular stereotype of an ‘oily’ or ‘greasy’ physical appearance. My sources show that greaseball has been applied to Greeks, Italians, and Puerto Ricans. Greaser was used for Italians, Puerto Ricans, and as early as 1836 for Mexicans. Mexicans were also called grease gut, grease boy, and oiler. Long ago a few amateur etymologists suggested that the names greaser and oiler for Mexicans came from the occupation of lubricating the wheels of railway cars, but that is fantastic folk etymology. A dual influence of the two stereotypes of generous amounts of fat in cooking and swarthy appearance probably account for greaser and greaseball. Mexican country cooking is notably fatty but Southern Italian cooking is not. Greaser recently emerged as an urban class epithet, a seeming counterpart to the (originally Southern) rural class epithet redneck.

All of these slurs in American slang indicate a great historical awareness of alien ethnic food, its preparation, and the eating of it, another case of dislike for the unlike. Most of the dietary stereotypes have to do with simple, staple, but distinctive foods associated with immigrants and other low-status groups. Ethnic name-calling traffics at one level in highly visible cultural differences. But more basic than culture clash, hurling epithets has to do with putting ethnic persons and groups into their place and serves a primordial need to establish a pecking order in the plural community and society (55-6)."

Other derogatory names for Mexican Americans, obtained from Allen’s The Language of Ethnic Conflict:

-bean-eater [1919. Also bean, beaner, beano]; bracero [c. 1942. From Spanish bracero, day laborer]; brown; cachupin [19^th century]; chico [from Spanish chico, boy]; chili-eater [1919. Also chili, chili-bean, -belly, -chomper]; chili-picker [1919]; choctaw [probably from name of American Indian group, by way of another meaning since 1870s of something unintelligible, as speech or gibberish. Cf. origin of gringo for non-Spanish speakers]; dago [1832 to 1880s, after which the term attached to Italians]; dyno [or dino. Cf. dino for Italians]; enchilada-eater; ese [from border Spanish ese bato, that guy]; frijole-guzzler; frito [from Spanish frito, dish of fried food, perhaps reinforced by the ‘Frito Bandito’ corn-chip commercials]; gaucho [from Spanish gaucho, cowboy of the Pampas]; grease-gut [also grease-boy]; halfbreed; hombre [from Spanish hombre, man]; hot-tamale [fem. 1929]; mexican-dish [fem. 1930s]; mexicano [or mejicano. Also altered to mescan. Also mexican, shortened to mex (1927), mexie]; mick [an extension of the nickname for the Irish. Catholics in general were called micks]; native [used in New Mexico]; never-sweat [an allusion to laziness]; oiler [1907]; paisano [from Spanish paisano, peasant]; pelado [from Spanish pelado, a poor ill-bred person]; peon [from Spanish peon, unskilled farm-worker. Especially offensive when pronounced ‘pee-on’]; pepper [1920]; pepper-belly; primo [from Spanish primo, dupe]; sexy-mex [fem.]; shuck; Spaniard; speedy-gonzales [from the name of the hero of the ethnic ‘jokes’]; spick [or spic, spik, spike. 1915. Same term used for other Latin American and Southern European groups. Traditionally from accented pronunciation of speak, as in phrase ‘No spick Engleesh.’]; sun-grinner; taco-eater; tamale; wetback [1942. Originally an illegal immigrant. From allusion to wet appearance after wading the Rio Grande]; yellow-belly.

Some History Behind the Use of Derogatory Nicknames:

It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and here they exercised their fancy without restraint. Setting aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother-tongue, and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of cards), gulch, gully and billion, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by gum-shoe, mortgage-shark, carpet-bagger, cut-off, mass-meeting, dead-beat, dug-out, shot-gun, stag-party, wheat-pit, horse-sense, chipped-beef, oyster-supper, buzz-saw, chain-gang and hell-box. And of the third there are instances in buncombe, greaser, conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, maverick, roustabout, bugaboo and blizzard.

Our unmatchable vocabulary of derisive names for foreigners reveals the national attitude. The French boche, the German hunyadi (for Hungarian), 23 and the old English frog or froggy (for Frenchman) seem lone and feeble beside our great repertoire: dago, wop, guinea, kike, goose, mick, harp, 24 bohick, bohee, bohunk, heinie, square-head, greaser, canuck, spiggoty, 25 spick, chink, polack, dutchie, skibby, 26 scowegian, hunkie and yellow-belly. This disdain tends to pursue an immigrant with extraordinary rancor when he bears a name that is unmistakably foreign and hence difficult to the native, and open to his crude burlesque. Moreover, the general feeling penetrates the man himself, particularly if he be ignorant, and he comes to believe that his name is not only a handicap, but also intrinsically discreditable—that it wars subtly upon his worth and integrity.

Allen, Irving Lewis. The Language of Ethnic Conflict. (1983). New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 62-3.

Allen, Irving Lewis. Unkind Words: Ethnic Labeling from Redskin to WASP. (1990). New York: Bergin & Garvey, An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. pp. 55-6.

Berrey, Lester V. and Den Bark, Melvin Van. The American Thesaurus of Slang: A Complete Reference Book of Colloquial Speech. (1945). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. p. 823.

"Greaser." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. http://www.yahooligans.com/reference/dictionary/entries/66/g0246600.html

"Greaser." Oxford English Dictionary. 2^nd ed. (1989).

Mencken, H.L.  (1880–1956).  The American Language.  (1921). http://www.bartleby.com/185/15.html.

Partridge, Eric. Slang: To-day and Yesterday. 4^th Edition. (1972). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.