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Australian Arts

Different words

1 August 2020

9:00 AM

1 August 2020

9:00 AM

If you’d been in our house during the Coon cheese debacle you would have heard me shouting at the TV: ‘It’s two different words, dummies!’ Word one: ‘coon’—common noun (lower case ‘c’), originally (from 1742) an abbreviation of ‘racoon’ a carnivorous animal, and then (from 1862) an offensive slang name for a black person.

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