Uh oh. Here I live in western NC and that term wasn't in my vocabulary. I was thinking crackhead.

Edited as follows:

This is from Wikipedia, and was the first thing I found when I googled "cracker pejorative" (without the quote marks of course.)

White cracker," or simply "cracker," was originally a pejorative term for a white person mainly used by blacks in the Southern United States, a usage that is now somewhat archaic. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, the term is now also used informally as a self-description by some white residents of Florida and Georgia ("Florida cracker" or "Georgia cracker") to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations.

As an insult, "cracker" was typically invoked against a white American, particularly (though not necessarily) lower-income, uneducated rural men in the South. The term did not have quite the extreme derisive power of the word "nigger," presumably due to the vastly lopsided social situation between southern whites and blacks when the term was common.

There are various theories about the origin of the term "cracker." The term has been traced to the 1760s, when it was used by the Earl of Dartmouth to refer to frontiersmen who were "great boasters." It may be derived from the Gaelic "craic," meaning "entertaining conversation." Other theories include references to the slavemaster term "whipcracker" and to the 18th century practice of cracking corn to make liquor.

In thinking about it I guess this probably was rather dimly in my vocabulary, but not my "working vocabulary."

I apologize to anyone I offended.

TEd


TEd