The terms "red-neck" and "hick" are out of place. "Cafone" is an Italian expression chiefly used by people who live in italian-ethnic American communities that sprang up after the turn of the prior century, i.e. the 1900s. I have heard Italian-descended residents of Philadelphia's Italian Market area use it to mean someone "who just came off the boat" [from poverty-striken rural Italy].
So the "naive, stupid, uneducated" or "rural" aspects of the definition do apply, as well as an overtone of "does not yet know how to act in America", but Italian peasants have never been known by the terms "red-neck" or "hick."
"Red-neck" and "hick originated in the American South of a much earlier time, 1840 and before, when Scots-Irish people from Ulster migrated to America, according to historian Arthur Herman in How the Scots Invented the Modern World. "Red-neck" was a term of anti-Presbyterian mockery used by wealthy English-descended cotton plantation owners, who were Anglicans and were also the power elite of the colonies and pre-Civil War America. Presbyterian pastors wore a red collar to distinguish themselves from Anglican priests; hence the term "red-neck." That term later became generalized to apply to any Scots-Irish or white-skinned (easily sunburned) farm laborer in the south who was neither wealthy nor upper-class (i.e. English-descended).
"Hick" is also an expression from the Anglo-Celt American South of an earlier time, not associated with Italians, or particularly the Italians who arrived on boats to the major port cities of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore at the turn of the 20th century and set up "Little Italy" conclaves in those cities.
Second- and third-generation Italian-Americans of the 1940s through 1990s who continued to live in urban Italian enclaves used the term "cafone" to try to set themselves apart as more knowlegeable and more Americanized. Many forbade their children to speak Italian, referring to it as "greaseball" language. They wanted to fit in and become recognized as fully American in a culture that whose elites were then Anglo-Saxon and whose ruling class within their Catholic churches were the waves of Irish immigrants who had preceded them. One of the indignant expressions I heard frequently in Philadelphia's Italian Market was "I was born and raised here!" in any dispute over customs, behavior, territory or rights within the community.
Awesome information. You must be in academia or some well-read Ph.D. (I am neither!)
Thanks for the primer! In our family, the use of the word cafon was used primarily for people who acted in ways unbecoming, which gave us great practice for describing the current administration.
Thanks for the ping :)
Great post, Albion Wilde.
South Philly, Wildwood, Margate (and other Shore Points). Oh the memories.
We watched the show. Snookie and her poof, Pauly D and his blow out, lol.