Originally Posted By: KeithS
Well, I know that like myself you are of Slovenian extraction (my mother was an Ulle). I grew up listening to my family and the folks around the SNPJ lodge refer to each other as Hunkies and Bohunks but let someone outside of the Slovenian community call them that and that person better have good dental insurance. Don't act like its any different.


My youth was in a neighborhood comprised of every kind of Slavic ethnicity, so we heard them all. Slovenians, Croats, Serbs, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Polacks, Austrians... that whole area was represented. And the term others called all of those ethnicities was "DPs", for "displaced persons". One of my old Italian pals had a father named Tony, and he told us, with his perfect Bob Newhart deadpan face, that Italians were all named Tony because when they were herded onto ships to come over they had a piece of tape stuck on their shirt that said ToNY, meaning "To New York". And we bought that! I mean we were little kids. In our hood all the Italians that had "2 part" names, like LoPresti, LaRocco, DiBello, DiLisi, DeGeronimo.... we just called them all "Deuce" because they had 2 names. I later learned that Slovenians were called "Grinders" and there was much folklore about that, ranging from the love of polka music, which led to accordion players being called organ grinders, to the prevalence of Slovenian immigrants taking jobs in machine shops that did a lot of industrial milling and such, which was called grinding. The Wiki version is that grinder is a derivative of a German word "Krainer", meaning someone from the German area of Krain, near the Hungarian border.

Most of my education about ethnicity came when I joined the Army and met people from all over the country. On those late nights late in the month when nobody had money we would buy cheap beer and sit around the barracks drinking and talking about such things. I remember Mike Gilhooley, who we all though was Irish, telling us that his family roots were in England. And a guy named Wright, with flaming orange hair, was a Native American. He used to laugh saying "Apparently mama got around." Those conversations were really interesting. Etymology of any kind is fascinating stuff. Words, people, sports, music....