METROMANIA : RACISM

Sticks and stones may hurt my bones but names, well names really do hurt. And nothing hurts like the undeniable - Jew, nigger, Paki - even though it's the tone that wounds, not the thing itself. Just pick on the country or language or shared phys ical characteristics: Nip, Yid, slant-eye.

The other trick is to pick out a common name. Yankee, for instance, from all those Dutch settlers called Janke, or dago from Diego for anyone Hispanic. Closer to home we have Jocks and Taffs (from Dafydd) and Micks and Paddies, In the north of Ireland the Protestants call the Catholic Irish taigs, from the once common name Teague. The Catholics content themselves with Prods, although hardline loyalists are black bastards, because members of the orange order dress in black, if you follow.

There is no convincing explanation for the origin of kike, which dates from turn-of-the-century America. Some say that illiterate and understandably paranoid Jews arriving at Ellis Island refused to sign with the Christian symbol of a cross and marked their landing papers with a kikel (circle) instead.

This seems unlikely, however, because - as any Spectator reader will tell you - these self-same Jews were sitting around in Minsk and Warsaw drafting the screenplay of Gone With The Wind, so they can't have been illiterate. Goyim, the Jews' term for gentiles, isn't really insulting; it means "the people", just any old people, not the chosen.

Wop remains the favourite put-down for an Italian. It derives from the Sicilian and Neapolitan greeting Guappol - "Hi, handsome." This greeting, common in Spain, may date from the 14th century, when Sicily was ruled from Barcelona. Sicilian children are to this day admonished with "Behave, or I'll call the Catalans." The Spanish call Catalans polacos (Poles), heaven knows why.

Just when America's white liberals and black middle class hit on the term African-American, the black underclass has revived with some pride the hated word nigger, perhaps to give the lie to the myth that they are welcome to join Mr Charlie and the ballheads in the melting pot. As the New York rapper KRS-I comments wryly, being African-American is "not fully American but getting there very slowly".