Spic

This article is about the ethnic slur. For the Indian petrochemicals company, see SPIC.

Spic, also spelled spik, spick, or spig, is an ethnic slur used in the United States for a Hispanic. It can also mean anyone of vaguely Spanish extraction, such as a Latin American, Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Filipino; or any foreigner at all; or even anyone of apparently foreign ancestry. The first s is usually set in lowercase type, but is sometimes set uppercase. Spic can be used both as a noun and an adjective, and is even used at times as a name for the Spanish language. For example, Ernest Hemingway in Winner take Nothing (1934, page 200) wrote "I wish I could talk spik . . . I don't get any fun out of asking that spik questions."

The word has been dated to around 1916, when its first known written usage was by Earnest Peixotto in Our Hispanic Southwest, page 102. One of the first recorded usages of the word was in Ladies' Home Journal, on September 17, 1919, when it wrote "The Marines had been . . . silencing the elusive ‘spick’ bandit in Santo Domingo." Its history before that time, however, is tedless certain. It may derive from spig, in turn from spiggoty (sometimes spelled spiggity, spigotti, or spigoty) which is also used as both a noun and an adjective. The oldest known use of spiggoty is in 1910 by Wilbur Lawton in Boy Aviators in Nicaragua, or, in League with the Insurgents, page 331. The word was also used to refer to Italians around the same time, leading Stuart Berg Flexner in I hear America Talking, (1976) to suggest that it may actually derive from "no spik Ingles". Finally, a third theory is that the word spiggoty originally referred to Italians and thus was derived from the word spaghetti. All three theories are in line with standard naming practices, which include attacking people according to the foods they eat (see Kraut) and for their failure to speak a language (see Barbarian). A slur derived from spic is "spic and span" (first used in the American Negro community in the 1950s) meaning a mixed Puerto Rican and Negro couple.

As mentioned above, Ladies' Home Journal, and Ernest Hemingway have used the word in the past. It was also used by William Faulkner in Knight's Gambit (1946) page 137, when he said "I don't intend that a fortune-hunting Spick shall marry my mother." It was later used by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934 in Tender is the Night p. 275, although in a dialog: "‘He's a spic!’ he said. He was frantic with jealousy."

Works consulted

• Hugh Rawson, "spic(k)" Wicked Words, (1989) p. 19.
• John A. Simpson and Edmund S.C. Weiner, eds. "spic", The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989)
• Jonathon Green, "spic and span", The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, (1998) p. 390.

spic

adj : completely neat and clean; "the apartment was immaculate"; "in her immaculate white uniform"; "a spick-and-span kitchen"; "their spic red-visored caps" [syn: immaculate, speckless, spick-and-span, spic-and-span, spick, spotless]