I was going to start the previous post with the ever-popular Bugs Bunny insult, "What a maroon," just because it seemed appropriate; or at least amusing. Hoping to find something Bugs related to go along with the quote, I Googled it and found this little tidbit:
What a maroon! What an ignoranimous!
Apparently, "Maroon", in the 17th & 18th centuries, was similar to terms like octoroon and quadroon (which identified a person's ancestry based on the amount of European and, more specifically, Black blood in their ancestry) and was used to refer to fugitive Black slaves in the West Indies. (If you need to substitute "African-American" for "Black" in the above to feel comfortable, feel free. Since African-American wasn't a term in use at the time these other words were common, I figured I'd stick with the term used in the definitions I've linked to.)
It's obvious to me that the Looney Tunes writers were unlikely to be aware of this usage (nor concerned by it), and were simply doing what they'd done in many other Bugs Bunny cartoons… playing on words and having fun with the language. Bugs is known for his malapropisms and changing "moron" to "maroon" is the kind of wordplay that they engaged in on a regular basis. It can also be argued that the author of snarkout may just qualify for the Sean Penn Home for the Humor-Challenged.
Now, I'm not going to let this info bother me, nor interfere with my enjoyment of Bugs Bunny cartoons in the future. And it might be a bit much to say that snarkout's the reason I changed my mind about naming the previous post. (Frankly, the VAST number of links to other's using "what a maroon" in some context had much more to do with it.) But why should I contribute to the clutter with yet another "what a maroon" titled article, right?
(Yeah, yeah, I know. You could say I'm already contributing to the clutter with this post, but since it's about why I'm not going to contribute to the clutter by using the phrase, then it doesn't COUNT as contributing to the clutter. You see how that works? It's a whole "meta" thing.)
What a maroon! What an ignoranimous!
Apparently, "Maroon", in the 17th & 18th centuries, was similar to terms like octoroon and quadroon (which identified a person's ancestry based on the amount of European and, more specifically, Black blood in their ancestry) and was used to refer to fugitive Black slaves in the West Indies. (If you need to substitute "African-American" for "Black" in the above to feel comfortable, feel free. Since African-American wasn't a term in use at the time these other words were common, I figured I'd stick with the term used in the definitions I've linked to.)
It's obvious to me that the Looney Tunes writers were unlikely to be aware of this usage (nor concerned by it), and were simply doing what they'd done in many other Bugs Bunny cartoons… playing on words and having fun with the language. Bugs is known for his malapropisms and changing "moron" to "maroon" is the kind of wordplay that they engaged in on a regular basis. It can also be argued that the author of snarkout may just qualify for the Sean Penn Home for the Humor-Challenged.
Now, I'm not going to let this info bother me, nor interfere with my enjoyment of Bugs Bunny cartoons in the future. And it might be a bit much to say that snarkout's the reason I changed my mind about naming the previous post. (Frankly, the VAST number of links to other's using "what a maroon" in some context had much more to do with it.) But why should I contribute to the clutter with yet another "what a maroon" titled article, right?
(Yeah, yeah, I know. You could say I'm already contributing to the clutter with this post, but since it's about why I'm not going to contribute to the clutter by using the phrase, then it doesn't COUNT as contributing to the clutter. You see how that works? It's a whole "meta" thing.)
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