"Macho": The singularity of a mock Spanish item
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7557/1.10.1.5577Keywords:
Macho, Mock Spanish, Spanish Philology, Mexico, Corpus LinguisticsAbstract
This paper scrutinizes the path of the semantic extension of the originally neutral Spanish term macho ‘male animal’ to the pejorative ‘animal-like man’. Semantic pejoration belongs to one of the techniques that Hill (1995b) identifies when describing Mock Spanish, a type of racist discourse used by monolingual English speakers when using single Spanish words. Prototypically, the author of the semantic change from a positive or neutral to a negative connotation of a Spanish term is the monolingual speaker of American English. This seems not to be the case with respect to macho. In the same theoretical vein as Mock Spanish, many voices attribute the semantic pejoration of macho to the US-English discourse. The objective of this paper is to identify the origin of this pejoration. Methodologically, this is conducted by means of a lexical search of the oldest pejorated macho items in Spanish, and the semantic content of the first macho borrowings in English. For this purpose, I consulted different sources, like diachronic corpora, etymological dictionaries and specialized references on the macho concept for Spanish as well as English. My analysis leads me to conclude that the semantic shift of macho, at least in its written form, developed in both sides of the Mexican-American border at the beginning of the XX century.
References
Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ) (n.d.). The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. Available at https://pj.ninjal.ac.jp/corpus_center/bccwj/en/freq-list.html.
Cresswell, J. (2010). Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. Oxford, Oxford Press University.
Davies, M. (comp.) (2010). Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Available at https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/.
González de Eslava, F. (1574). Coloquio III - A la consagración del doctor don Pedro Moya de Contreras. Mexico City, Editorial Joaquín García Icazbalceta.
Guilbault, R. (2015). Americanization is tough on macho, en L. Brandon & K. Brandon, Paragraphs and essays with integrated readings. Boston, Cengage Learning, pp. 347-349.
Gutmann, M. (2007). The meanings of macho: Being a man in México city. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press.
Hill, J. (1995a). Junk Spanish, Covert Racism, and the (Leaky) Boundary between Public and Private Spheres. Pragmatics, 5(2), pp. 197-212. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.5.2.07hil DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.5.2.07hil
Hill, J. (1995b). Mock Spanish: A Site for the Indexical Reproduction of Racism in American English. Language & Culture Symposium 2. Available at http://www.language-culture.org/colloquia/symposia/.
Hill, J. (1998). "Language, race, and white public space". American Anthropologist 100(3), pp. 680–689, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680
Hill, J. (2005). "Intertextuality as source and evidence for indirect indexical meanings". Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1), pp. 113–124. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.113 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.113
Hill, J. (2008). The everyday language of white racism. Malden, Oxford, West Sussex, Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304732 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304732
Lewis, O. (1966). “The culture of poverty”. Scientific American, 215(4), pp. 19-25. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1066-19 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1066-19
Machillot, D. (2013). Machos y machistas. Historia de los estereotipos mexicanos. Mexico City, Ariel.
Mahoney, R. (1999). Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. New York, Arcade Publishing.
Martín, Y. (2008). “Machismo”, in L. Kontos & D. Brotherton (eds.), Encyclopedia of Gangs. Westport Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press.
Melhuus, M. (1996). Power, value and the ambiguous meanings of gender, in M. Melhuus & K. Stolen, Machos Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting The Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. New York, Verso, pp. 230-259.
Mendoza, V. (1962). El machismo en México: al través de las canciones, corridos y cantares, in Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano 3, pp. 75–86.
Online Etymology Dictionary (n.d.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=macho.
Paredes, A. (1971). The United States, Mexico and “Machismo”, in Journal of the Folklore Institute 8(1), pp. 17-37. https://doi.org/10.2307/3814061 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3814061
Paredes, R. (2000). The origins of anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States, in M. Gonzalez & C. Gonzalez, En aquel entonces. Readings in Mexican-American history. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, pp. 45-52.
Real Academia Española (RAE) (2014). Diccionario de la lengua española (23 ed.). Available at https://dle.rae.es/macho?m=form.
Real Academia Española (RAE) (n.d). Banco de datos (CORDE) [en línea]. Corpus diacrónico del español. Available at http://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).