In an ugly moment on Fox News, Sarah Palin attacked President Obama on Saturday.
When asked a question about the pursuit of Edward Snowden, Palin went into attack mode stating:
But with Obama deciding to just oh I guess lead from behind on this issue too, that’s the community organizer in our president. That’s a bit of that lackadaisical eh you know, don’t have to take responsibility. His resume proves he hasn’t had to responsibility for much in all these years. This just another issue, another example that falls in line with a community organizer.
PoliticusUSA is reporting Sarah Palin’s comments as being racist. They begin by stating that “by community organizer, Sarah Palin means black man” and go on to add the following critique of the word “lackadaisical” –
The stereotype of the lackadaisical African-American goes back to slavery and Jim Crow. According to the 1937 book Class and Caste in a Southern Town, “It is a common error in judging lower class Negroes to compare them unfavorably with foreign immigrants, stressing the lackadaisical Negro work habits, and referring to the energy and zeal for advancement of a foreign peasantry.”
Author Mariann S. Regan explained that lackadaisical is part of the South’s history racist terminology used to describe African-Americans, “In the light of my family memoir Into the Briar Patch, I can see how this stereotype was born during slavery and Jim Crow. Growing up, I learned that the South’s rich vocabulary for laziness was often applied to African-Americans: shiftless, no-account, trifling, good-for-nothing, lackadaisical, half-hearted, slow as molasses. In the South, slaves labored in the fields from sunup to sundown. Yet somehow the blacks were the ones who got called lazy.”
While I have no doubts that Palin is a racist, I find their analysis less than compelling particularly if one looks to the true origin of the word “lackadaisical.”
Lackadaisical may now be a single word but, in its original form, it derived from a phrase, albeit by a circuitous route. The phrase in question is ‘alack a day’ or ‘alack the day’. It was used first by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, 1592, on Romeo’s mistaken belief that Juliet had died:
Shee’s dead, deceast, shee’s dead: alacke the day!
Alack itself can be broken down into the exclamation ‘Ah’ and ‘lack’, which then meant failure or shame. Alack-a-day was a recognition of woe or regret at some unfortunate occurrence.
‘Alack-a-day’ migrated into ‘lack-a-day’, by a process known as aphesis. This is defined by the OED as – the gradual and unintentional loss of a short unaccented vowel at the beginning of a word; as in squire for esquire.
It was used by John Eachard in The Grounds & Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired, 1685. At that date the ‘lack’ spelling wasn’t yet fully accepted and this citation proceeded the phrases by a hyphen, indicating the missing ‘A’.
‘Lack a day. how easie a matter is it for old folks to dote and slaver, and for young ones to. be deceived.
Having been shortened ‘lack-a-day’ now became extended to become the rather fanciful ‘lack-a-daisy’. This ornamentation may have been influenced by the existence of the term ‘ups-a-daisy‘, a version of which was in use by 1711.
Tobias Smollett, recorded this piece of street slang in the satirical novel The adventures of Roderick Random, 1748:
Finding the sheets cold, [she] exclaimed, “Good lack-a-daisy! the rogue is fled!”
The novelist Laurence Sterne formed the adjectival form of ‘lack-a-daisy’, in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 1768:
Would to Heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by, and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-adaysical manner.
Lackadaisical may be a single word but it displays an almost Germanic effort to encapsulate an entire paragraph’s worth of meaning. To translate from the constituent parts that it is built from, it means ‘in the manner of someone who, for all of the day, exhibits a sense of languid dissatisfaction of some failure or fault’. SOURCE
You can decide for yourself, and feel free to share your thoughts after watching the video below:
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