Folk etymology claims the term originated either from their cracking, or pounding, of corn (rather than taking it to mill), or from their use of whips to drive cattle.
Codemasters Music 2000 Er Cracker Tips ToThe latter explanation makes sense, because in piney-woods Georgia and Florida pastoral yeomen did use bullwhips with cracker tips to herd cattle.Linguists now believe the original root to be the Gaelic craic, still used in Ireland (anglicized in spelling to crack ) for entertaining conversation.The English meaning of cracker as a braggart appears by Elizabethan times, as, for example, in Shakespeares King John (1595): What cracker is this... With this abundance of superfluous breath. The word then came to be associated with the cowboys of Georgia and Florida, many of them descendants of those early frontiersmen. Cothran, Talking Trash in the Okefenokee Swamp Rim, Georgia, in Readings in American Folklore, ed. Jan H. Brunvand (New York: Norton, 1979). Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). John Solomon Otto, Cracker: The History of a Southeastern Ethnic, Economic, and Racial Epithet, Names 35 (1987): 28-39. Delma E. Presley, The Crackers of Georgia, Georgia Historical Quarterly 60 (summer 1976): 102-16. Jeanes was a Philadelphia Quaker philanthropist who sought to improve community and school conditions for rural African Americans.
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