Who's yer daddy? And what's a hoosier, anyway?

On Blawg Review, a "blawg" being a law blog, there's a review of a cleverly named blog, Hoosier Daddy, by an Indianapolis lawyer whose more lawyerly blawg is titled Hoosier Lawyer.

So, what's a hoosier, anyway?

In colonial America, the terms cracker and hoosier were widely used to refer to white farmers who did not own slaves or large plantations. Because the best agricultural land, the flat land near the rivers and seacoast, was generally used for growing cash crops in large plantations, small farms--usually in the hills and mountains--were identified with subsistence farming, and these farmers were poor and usually uneducated. Therefore, these terms had a derogatory connotation. Linguistic maps of the southern states indicate that cracker was used more often in the coastal areas of Virginia and North Carolina and in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Hoosier was predominant in the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina(1).

The southern half of Indiana, along the Ohio River, was settled first, along with Kentucky and Tennessee, and the earliest settlers came largely from the Appalachian region--Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. By the early 1800s "hoosier" was widely used in Indiana to refer to poor farmers or ignorant, rustic people in general.

The first newspaper usage of "hoosier" to refer to people from Indiana in general was in 1832. As sometimes happens, a nickname that originally had a negative connotation was adopted and used with pride by the bearers of the name. By the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), this nickname was firmly established. During the war, men from all parts of the United States came into close contact and relied on these nicknames to identify each other. Some examples: Indiana = Hoosiers, Maine = Foxes, Delaware = Muskrats, Ohio = Buckeyes, Wisconsin = Badgers, Iowa = Hawkeyes, New York = Knickerbockers.

So, there ya have it, cracker!