In first grade, the “Mr. Men” books were all the rage. The short length and taxonomic/essentialist nature of the series and characters appealed to me very greatly. And though many of the books taught me terms for vices that I didn’t know (fussy, mischievous, nosey), the only book I could not understand was Mr. Uppity. I could not get a grasp of what made him “uppity” instead of, say, just “rude” or “selfish.” I got the sense, though, that it had something to do with money–look at his saucy bourgeois hat!
So when I started coming into contact with the term “uppity” later in life–almost always affixed to variant of “negro,” I could not square how the new datapoints related to Mr. Uppity. But, once Lynn Westmoreland referred to the Obamas as “uppity,” repeating the term for clarification, investigation into the word began anew, leading up to yesterday’s post on Language Log.
Zwicky narrows his post to Westmoreland’s office’s turning to the dictionary as an authority, to supposedly prove that “uppity” has no inherent racial character. Mr. Uppity, despite his unfortunate coloring, might be more proof of that. But Zwicky echoes (and links to) the point that Brent Staples made: it’s very, very unlikely that Lynn Westmoreland, who was born in Georgia and was 14 when the Civil Rights Act was signed, did not know of the racial shading of the term “uppity.” So, in another edition of “Using Google as my Research Assistant,” let’s make some speculations as to whether or not that’s true. Below is a matrix of search terms and hits:
- uppity: 1,790,000
- uppity -westmoreland: 1,400,000
- “uppity [person term]“: < 1,000
- uppity man: 1,050,000
- “Mr. Uppity”: 5,360
My goal here was to see what kinds of words uppity tends to modify. As you can see, terms like “uppity man,” “uppity person,” or “uppity fellow” don’t make up even .1% of the total hits for “uppity.” Searching for both “uppity” and “man,” of course, fills out the bulk of the “uppity” hits, look at what happens when you refine it:
- uppity man -westmoreland -obama: 520,000
- uppity man -black -negro -african-american -race: 278,000
- uppity man -black -negro -african-american -westmoreland -obama: 202,000
Pulling out the newsy terms (”Westmoreland” and “Obama”) and the racial terms trims away 80% of the hits. Considering that removing the racial terms removes over 70% of the hits really weakens Westmoreland’s claim to never have heard “uppity” used in conjunction with race.
So let’s try this same pattern, but building up:
- “uppity black”: 18,900
- “uppity negro”: 89,700
- uppity black: 869,000
- uppity negro: 105,000
According to Google, the preferred form is “uppity negro,” which makes sense, as it’s the form I’ve encountered the most in the past (though not the form quoted in the OED). It is also the name of a six year old blog, which possibly helps its Google popularity.
But considering Westmoreland’s claim that “uppity” means “elitist,” let’s see how that plays out positively:
- uppity negro: 105,000
- uppity elitist -obama: 40,900
- uppity elitist -obama -race -negro -racist -black: 877
This isn’t a great comparison, since in the former, one term is modifying (or augmenting) the other, whereas in the latter, both are synonyms, but then look at the third line, which tries to strip the racial terms the model, leaving only “uppity” and “elitist” together.
So if the nostalgia for an antebellum paternalist past is what seems to motivate use of the term “uppity,” at least in comparison to equating “uppity” with “elitist,” how does that play out, you might ask, in the other realm of paternalism, namely gender?
I’m fucking glad you asked!
- “uppity woman”: 38,700
- uppity woman: 244,000
- uppity bitch: 227,000
- uppity blues women: 58,700
This number of hits is helped along by the presence of multiple blogs using the expression “uppity woman” as well as the popularity of the blues band “The Uppity Blues Women.” But, of course, those names only give more weight to the argument that running the two terms together makes perfect sense in our society.
And I was startled at first to see how many hits “uppity” paired with “bitch” brought up, until I figured that if you’re using a derisive adjective, you might as well use a derisive noun. Using other derogatory terms for women consistently yields 40k+ hits per term.
What, then, does Google tell us? First, Mr. Uppity is very likely not uppity. He is rude and selfish. “Uppity” is someone who does not know his place, and Mr. Uppity, as the richest man in town, certainly knows his “place.” He’s just a jerk. It’s notable that his punishment is shrinking in size after each instance of “uppitiness”–he is being reduced, marginalized.
Google tells us this because Mr. Uppity is not already a marginalized person. “Uppity” modifies traditionally marginalized people (uppity gay: 350,000, though this number shows a ton of overlap with race and gender) who are acting out of their socially expected place. Furthermore, it is a term of derision.
So Westmoreland is lying. He may not have realized he was trafficking in such specifically offensive terminology, but I sincerely doubt he has ever heard “uppity” modifying anything other than an African-American or a woman.
Tags: Arnold Zwicky, Barack Obama, Brent Staples, Gender, language, Language Log, Lynn Westmoreland, marginalization, Mr. Men, Race, sexuality, usage
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