The history of the word "cracker"

Last week, Rachel Jeantel took the stand in the murder trial of George Zimmerman...  Jeantel said that Martin told her that a "creepy-ass cracker" was following him...

"Cracker," the old standby of Anglo insults [is] older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of "whip-cracker," since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip... Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition...

But it turns out cracker's roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least...

Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator. What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?...

"In official documents, the governor of Florida said, 'We don't know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do," Ste. Claire said. "They lived off the land. They were rogues."

By the early 1800s, those immigrants to the South started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor and a term of endearment...

Ste. Claire said that by the 1940s, the term began to take on yet another meaning in American inner cities in particular: as an epithet for bigoted white folks...

"Just because you lived in the South doesn't mean you're a cracker," Ste. Claire said. "To really call yourself a cracker you have to live the cracker way — you have to start your kitchen at 4 in the morning," he said.

Just like all those touristy, overpriced soul food joints, Ste. Claire said that you can find fancified cracker cuisine for sale at restaurants all over the South. "You can spend $40 on cracker food," he said. "I call that the revenge of the crackers. I'm sure a lot of crackers are rolling over in their graves at that."

More details at the Code Switch blog at NPR, via Sentence First.