I wish I were in the land of cotton, old farts there are not forgotten... look away, look away…
Tom "Lando" Cotton nowhere to be seen as Sonny Perdue goes "good old boy" at Ron's Country Bunker.
Former Governor of Georgia and the current Secretary of Agriculture, goes all “native”, using an idiomatic expression in a speech for a Florida governor’s race that has a Black candidate.
The phrase “cotton-pickin‘” bedeviled another Trump Republican earlier this year when the president’s former deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, apologized in June for telling a black guest on Fox News, “You’re out of your cotton-pickin' mind.”
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From the start of the general election, race has played a dominating factor in Florida’s nationally-watched governor‘s race. The day after the Aug. 28 primary election, on a different Fox show, DeSantis called Andrew Gillum “articulate” and said voters shouldn’t “monkey this up” by electing him.
Like Bossie, DeSantis was rebuked on air by a Fox News personality, but the former three-term congressman, who is white, refused to apologize because he said he did nothing wrong and his comment was not about race.
During an Oct. 21 debate, Gillum directly addressed the “monkey this up” remark in a racial context after the moderator asked DeSantis about the comments.
“He has only continued in the course of his campaign to draw all the attention he can to the color of my skin,” Gillum said. “The truth is, I’ve been black all of my life. So far as I know, I will die black.”
And you can imagine the usual tweet-storm of connotative dictionary police trying to talk about the balls in aspirin bottles and the denotative philologists noting that an older Euro-American person from a southern state hadn’t yet reached a post-civil rights sensibility.
(2015)
The phrase "are you out of your cotton-picking mind?" seems to have a serious racial overtone, particularly against black slaves in the Southern United States, who were the pickers of cotton for much of American history.
Cotton-picking is usually used as a stand-in for "damn," to make it more socially acceptable than swearing (ironically enough). If you're not from the South, you may have heard the adjective "cotton-picking" for the first time from a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1952.
Linguist Gary Martin over at The Phrase Finder has found that "cotton-picking" is actually a pretty old term, dating back to the first European cotton plantations in the 1700s, but that it only really showed up as an adjective in the 1940s. And in the examples he found, it referred to Southerners in general, not just blacks. But as a massive debate over the use of the phrase in Canadian parliament in 2011 shows, many still believe that to ask somebody to "wait just a cotton-picking minute" is to make a derogatory link between a slave occupation and a modern expression of frustration. Obviously, it's not difficult to see why.
There's yet another variety on the phrase: To call somebody a "cotton-picker" is undeniably, completely racist.
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