Race Relations and the Thermostat
One half of my family is Scotch-Irish get drunk at the beach and burn to a crisp white. The other half is Mexican (of the indigenous, have great aunts who speak more Nahuatl than Spanish when alone together type). When the two groups are together one side can never believe how warm/cold the other likes to keep their house. The Celts liking the cold and the Mexicans no so much. I tend to take after the white side, my brothers the Amerindians. I remember in college I had an African American GF who eventually wouldn't stay over night because "it is like a deep freeze in your apartment." Recently I saw an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David was arguing with his African American house guests The Blacks, about the temperature in the house, with them telling him he kept it too cold and his insisting they liked it too hot. Anybody else encountered this phenomena?
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Terminology[edit]
The term Scotch-Irish is first known to have been used to refer to people living in Northeastern Ireland. In a letter of April 14, 1573, in reference to Ulster, Elizabeth I of England stated, "We are given to understand that a nobleman named 'Sorley Boy' [MacDonnel] and others, who be of the Scotch-Irish race”.[9] This term continued in usage for over a century[10] before the earliest known American reference appeared in a Maryland affidavit in 1689/90.[11]
Today, Scotch-Irish is an Americanism almost unknown in England, Ireland or Scotland.[8] The term is somewhat unclear because some of the Scotch-Irish have little or no Scottish ancestry at all, as a large number of dissenter families had also been transplanted to Ulster from northern England. Smaller numbers of migrants also came from Wales and the southeast of England, and others still from Flanders, the German Palatinate, and France (such as the French Huguenot ancestors of Davy Crockett).[12] What united these different national groups was their common Calvinist beliefs,[13] and their separation from the established church (Church of England and Church of Ireland in this case). Nevertheless, a large Scottish element in the Plantation of Ulster gave the settlements a Scottish character.
Upon arrival in America, the Scotch-Irish at first usually referred to themselves simply as Irish, without the qualifier Scotch. It was not until a century later, following the surge in Irish immigration after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, that the descendants of the earlier arrivals began to commonly call themselves Scotch-Irish to distinguish them from the newer, largely destitute and predominantly Roman Catholic immigrants.[14] The two groups had little interaction in America, as the Scotch-Irish had become settled years earlier primarily in the Appalachian region, while the new wave of Irish American families settled primarily in port cities such as Boston, New York, Chicago, or New Orleans. However, many Irish migrated to the interior in the 19th century to work on large-scale infrastructure projects such as canals and railroads.[15]
The usage Scots-Irish is a relatively recent version of the term. Two early citations include: 1) "a grave, elderly man of the race known in America as " Scots-Irish" (1870);[16] and 2) "Dr. Cochran was of stately presence, of fair and florid complexion, features which testified his Scots-Irish descent" (1884)[17]
English author Kingsley Amis endorsed the traditional Scotch-Irish usage implicitly in noting that "nobody talks about butterscottish or hopscots,...or Scottish pine", and that while Scots or Scottish is how people of Scots origin refer to themselves in Scotland itself, the traditional English usage Scotch continues to be appropriate in "compounds and set phrases".[18]
In Ulster-Scots (or "Ullans"
, Scotch-Irish Americans are referred to as the Scotch Airish o' Amerikey.[19]
History of the term Scotch-Irish[edit]
Although referenced by Merriam-Webster dictionaries as having first appeared in 1744, the American term Scotch-Irish is undoubtedly older.
An affidavit of William Patent, dated March 15, 1689, in a case against a Mr. Matthew Scarbrough in Somerset County, Maryland, quotes Mr. Patent as saying he was told by Scarbrough that "...it was no more sin to kill me then to kill a dogg, or any Scotch Irish dogg..."[20]
Leyburn cites several early American uses of the term.[21]
The earliest is a report in June 1695, by Sir Thomas Laurence, Secretary of Maryland, that "In the two counties of Dorchester and Somerset, where the Scotch-Irish are numerous, they clothe themselves by their linen and woolen manufactures."
In September 1723, Rev. George Ross, Rector of Immanuel Church in New Castle, Delaware, wrote in reference to their anti-Church of England stance that, "They call themselves Scotch-Irish,...and the bitterest railers against the church that ever trod upon American ground."
Another Church of England clergyman from Lewes, Delaware, commented in 1723 that "...great numbers of Irish (who usually call themselves Scotch-Irish) have transplanted themselves and their families from the north of Ireland."
During the 1740s, a Marylander was accused of having murdered the sheriff of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, after calling the sheriff and his assistants "damned Scotch-Irish sons of bitches."[22]
The Oxford English Dictionary says the first use of the term Scotch-Irish came in Pennsylvania in 1744. Its citations are:
1744 W. MARSHE Jrnl. 21 June in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (1801) 1st Ser. VII. 177: 'The inhabitants [of Lancaster, Pa.] are chiefly High-Dutch, Scotch-Irish, some few English families, and unbelieving Israelites."
1789 J. MORSE Amer. Geogr. 313: "[The Irish of Pennsylvania] have sometimes been called Scotch-Irish, to denote their double descent."
1876 BANCROFT Hist. U.S. IV. iii. 333: "But its convenient proximity to the border counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia had been observed by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and other bold and industrious men."
1883 Harper's Mag. Feb. 421/2: "The so-called Scotch-Irish are the descendants of the Englishmen and Lowland Scotch who began to move over to Ulster in 1611."
In Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hackett Fischer asserts:
Some historians describe these immigrants as "Ulster Irish" or "Northern Irish". It is true that many sailed from the province of Ulster... part of much larger flow which drew from the lowlands of Scotland, the north of England, and every side of the Irish Sea. Many scholars call these people Scotch-Irish. That expression is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and much resented by the people to whom it was attached.
Fischer prefers to speak of "borderers" (referring to the historically war-torn England-Scotland border) as the population ancestral to the "backcountry" "cultural stream" (one of the four major and persistent cultural streams he identifies in American history) and notes the borderers were not purely Celtic but also had substantial Anglo-Saxon and Viking or Scandinavian roots, and were quite different from Celtic-speaking groups like the Scottish Highlanders or Irish (that is, Gaelic-speaking and Roman Catholic).
An example of the use of the term is found in A History of Ulster: "Ulster Presbyterians – known as the 'Scotch Irish' – were already accustomed to being on the move, and clearing and defending their land."[23]
Other terms used to describe the Scotch-Irish include Northern Irish[original research?][dubious – discuss][citation needed] or Irish Presbyterians.[original research?][citation needed]
While Scotch-Irish is the term most used in scholarship to describe these people, the use of the term can draw ire from both Scots and Irish. To the Scots, the term Scotch is derogatory when referring to a person or people, and should be applied only to whisky. Many Irish have claimed that such a distinction should not be used, and that those called Scotch-Irish are simply Irish.[8] However, as one scholar observed, "...in this country [USA], where they have been called Scotch-Irish for over two hundred years, it would be absurd to give them a name by which they are not known here... Here their name is Scotch-Irish; let us call them by it." [24]
The word "Scotch" was the favoured adjective as a designation — it literally means "... of Scotland". People in Scotland refer to themselves as Scots, or adjectivally/collectively as Scots or as being Scottish, rather than Scotch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_American#History_of_the_term_Scotch-Irish
Yes I know, people from Scotland are Scots, not Scotch.
