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Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity


December 30, 2013

Why Being 'Gypped' Hurts the Roma More Than It


Hurts You
by Janaki Challa
I never thought about the etymology of the verb "gypped" until the end of college, when
my friend, lamenting his stolen iPod, said the word and immediately retracted it. "Isn't
that offensive?" he wondered. Until that moment, I had never thought about it either.
What sparked our unease was the sudden realization that "gypped" was somehow tied to
"gypsy."

"Gypsy" is commonly used to describe the Romani people. But the term carries many
negative connotations, and its derivative carries even more: when somebody is
"gypped," they are, according to Merriam-Webster, "defrauded, swindled, cheated."
The Three Stooges movie Gypped In the Penthouse is one of many pieces of media that
uses the pejorative (Columbia Pictures)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known recorded definition of the
term "gypped" dates back to the 1899 Century Dictionary, which says that it is
"probably an abbreviation of gypsy, gipsy, as applied to a sly unscrupulous fellow."

It also appears in 1914, in Louis Jackson & C. R. Hellyer's Vocabulary of Criminal


Slang. The noun "gyp" was described at the time as "current in polite circles," and
"derived from the popular experience with thieving Gypsies." As a verb, the term is
defined as "to flim-flam" and to "cheat by means of guile and manual dexterity." Proper
usage? "Gyp this boob with a deuce." I'm not exactly sure what gyp this boob with a
deuce means, but it sounds like something stuck between ribald and ridiculous.

F. Scott Fitzgerald used the word in his iconic novel The Great Gatsby: "We had over
twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gyped out of it all in two days."
Simone de Beauvoir used the word in her 1965 book Force of Circumstance: "Turning
an incredulous gaze toward that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how
much I was gypped."
Many people have limited knowledge of the term's origins, and so the word
"gypped" isn't quickly going out of fashion. On April 30, 2013, a publisher released
a book in a New York Times bestselling series by Carol Higgins Clarktitled Gypped: A
Regan Reilly Mystery. The book the 15th installment of the long-running thriller
series had nothing to do with the Roma people, but instead is a murder mystery full of
financial scams and intrigue set in sunny California.

After multiple allegations of racist intent with her choice of title, Clark issued a
statement that read: "I am truly sorry for any offense caused by using the word
'Gypped' as the title of my book. It was a familiar word since childhood which no one I
knew associated with its origin. Since this issue arose,

"I encounter a lot of people who tell me that they never knew the word 'gypped' had
anything to do with gypsies, or that it's offensive especially when the word is heard
not read," says University of Texas at Austin professor Ian Hancock, who was born in
Britain to Romani parents. "My response to them is, That's okay. You didn't know but
now you do. So stop using it. It may mean nothing to you, but when we hear it, it still
hurts."

Hancock tells me the word "gypsy" itself is an "exonym" a term imposed upon an
ethnic group by outsiders. When the Roma people moved westward from India towards
the European continent, they were mistaken to be Egyptianbecause of their features
and dark skin. We see the same phenomenon across several languages, not only English.
Victor Hugo, in his epic Hunchback of Notre Dame, noted that the Medieval French
term for the Roma was egyptiens. In Spanish, the word for gypsy is "gitano," which
comes from the word egipcio, meaning Egyptian in Romanian: tigan, in Bulgarian:
tsiganin, in Turkish: cingene all of which are variations of slang words for "Egyptian"
in those languages.

The Roma people originated thousands of years ago not in Egypt, but in Northern India.
They were displaced during a series of 11th-century Muslim invasions during the
Ghaznavid Empire. Many were taken as prisoners of war back to what is now modern-
day Turkey, during the Ottoman plunder of the Byzantine Empire. A majority of
already-displaced Romani people later migrated to Eastern and Southern Europe. The
Roma language is derived from ancient Sanskrit and still phonetically, grammatically
and linguistically resembles tongues with Sanskrit roots like Hindi or Rajasthani.
Romani music is still strikingly similar to Indian folk music, and their spiritual practices
despite conversion to local religions over time still resemble aspects of Hindu
cosmology.

The effort to substitute the word "Roma" for the far better-known term "Gypsy" may
strike some as futile, but few other groups carry the burden of such heavy stereotypes
with so little reprieve.

Earlier this year, Romani faced several high-profile accusations of child kidnapping. In
October, Code Switch colleague Gene Demby wrote:
"In one case, the police received a tip that a blond, blue-eyed girl was living with a Roma family in a
Dublin suburb. The tipster believed that the 7-year-old didn't look like the Roma family with whom she
lived. The police came and removed the child from the home, despite protests from the Roma family that
the child was part of their family."

It is this kind of deep-set suspicion and generalized assumption of deception that drives
many Roma to reject the term "gypped." It probably doesn't help that the term was
originally meant to refer to Egyptians.

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