Me too.
Etymology
The
Merriam-Webster dictionary states wop's first known use was in the United States in 1908, and that it originates from the
Southern Italian dialectal term
guappo, roughly meaning "
dandy", or "
swaggerer", derived from the Spanish term
guapo, meaning "good-looking", "dandy", from Latin
vappa for "sour wine", also "worthless fellow".
[2][3][4]
In
Neapolitan and other Southern Italo-Romance varieties,
guappo is pronounced roughly as
wah-po.
[5][6] As word-final vowels in Southern Italian varieties are often realised as /ə/,
guappo would often sound closer to
wahpp to American or Anglo ears.
Guappo historically refers to a type of flashy, boisterous, swaggering, dandy-like criminal in the
Naples area. The word eventually became associated with members of the
Camorra and has often been used in the Naples area as a friendly or humorous term of address among men.
[7] The word likely transformed into the slur "wop" following the arrival of
poor Italian immigrants into the United States. Southern Italian immigrant males would often refer to one another as
guappo in a jocular or playful manner; as these Italian immigrants often worked as
manual laborers in the United States, their native-born American employers and fellow laborers took notice of the Italians' playful term of address and eventually began deploying it as a derogatory term for all Italians and Southern Europeans, along with the term
Dago.
[6] The term
guappo was especially used by older Italian immigrant males to refer to the younger Italian male immigrants arriving in America.
[8][5]
False etymologies
One
false etymology or
backronym of wop is that it is an
acronym for "without passport" or "without papers", implying that Italian immigrants entered the U.S. as
undocumented or illegal immigrants.
[9][10][11] The term has nothing to do with immigration documents, as these were not required by U.S. immigration officers until 1924,
[12] after the slur had already come into use in the United States.
[10]
nypost.com
www.washingtonexaminer.com
