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I'm reading a book about the Photographer Dorothea Lange and her work during the depression era and beyond as part of my photography course. I came across a photograph which she had taken in late '30s Mississippi. It's of the front of a small cinema, ornately decorated and adorned with the words:
'Theatre. For colored people only.'
Okay, typical of the era of segregation BUT why isn't it spelt Theater instead of Theatre???? I thought the former was more common in the US whilst the latter is often seen in Europe. If it is a case of a transition from one word to the other then did this take place in the '30s? And if so, why then?? What surprises me most is its inclusion with a clearly Americanised 'colored'. Have these words evolved into American English at different times?
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Carpal Tunnel
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You'll find the spellings theatre and centre occasionally in the US. It is probably a sign of some atttempt at being high class.
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old hand
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old hand
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You'll find the spellings theatre and centre occasionally in the US. It is probably a sign of some atttempt at being high class.
No, Faldage, the spelling more so represents the forgiving nature of the southern South as opposed to the more grudgeful northern North. Despite the atrocities visited upon us by the bloody British in the past, we are a most forgiving people and I write you from Birmingham, which is
sixty miles down the road from Centre, Alabama where only a few confused hill people pronounce it cin-tree.
I'm not through...
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Carpal Tunnel
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the forgiving nature of the southern South
What I like about you, milum. You do the tongue in cheek so well.
We forgot about the Waw bout a hunnerd years ago.
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Hi! In my early youth - which occurred in the 1930s - the spellings center and centre were both in use. My Dad, a newspaper man, told me that at the time many were conflicted between the English spelling (centre) and the American (center) with the American version eventually coming into most general usage. Some teachers, for instance were of an older generation which used the English centre and passed it along to their pupils ... and, remember, these same older teachers were recalled to their jobs during WWII when the younger men and women went to war either in the Armed Services or in war-related jobs.
The Associated Press Stylebook, btw, requires center.
As to "colored" - it was used to refer to all "people of color" i.e. those not European white. I heard colored used well into my teens, mostly in regard to Negros, the word that gained prominence in post WWII years and changed little until the Civil Rights Movenment.
Neither was considered pejorative at the time but rather more polite than "colored."
Oh, will someone tell me what the prefered appelation is now? Pleeeeese.
(Feeling really out of date -econ)
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I never fully realized how shameful the treatment of African Americans in the South was until one day in the center of Atlanta in WWII I was riding in a trackless trolley that sideswiped a regular trolley. Two soldiers, one black and one white had their elbows out the window of the trolley and were horribly injured, their arms being pulled right out of the sockets, the most ghastly dissection of the axilla, brachial plexus and blood vessels I ever saw. When I got out, the crowd would not get out of the way to let the ambulance personnel through. When I yelled at them to get out of the way, one man looked contemptuously over his shoulder, and sneered : "It's nothing but an n-word!" Only when I yelled that there was a white boy also terribly injured did they part for the medics.
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old hand
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old hand
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We forgot about the Waw bout a hunnerd years ago.-Faldage
Those who forget waws are destined to repeat them. -one of the Durants.
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Those who forget waws are destined to repeat them. -one of the Durants.
And those who don't forget them...
-- Faldage of Fong
Conceptual Detective and Free Lance Fool
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wwh: Your note brought to mind the moment in Huck Finn when Huck, mistaken for Tom Sawyer, tells Tom's Aunt Sally about a river boat blowing a cylinder-head:
"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"
"No'm. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get
hurt..."
As usual, Mark Twain said it all.
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Dear slithy toves: I think it is worth mentioning at this point current PC castigation of Mark Twain as racist is totally erroneous. In your quote, the callousness did not represent the author's beliefs. On the contrary; he knew that unconcealed anti-racist propaganda would offend just about everybody. When I was a teen-ager, I was really shook by the scene when Huck and Jim are going down the river on the raft, and Jim's crying because he misses his wife wakes Huck up, and for the first time Huck understands that Jim has feelings just as much as any white.
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