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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

What's the link between vaquero and cowboy? I get that they both derive from the name of the same animal but is there actually a lineal relationship between them? And why would a Spanish source word cancel out or disprove any later racial associations of the word?

Regarding the other terms that were in use: Cowhand, ranchhand, drovers, stockmen etc etc. - does the use of these terms disprove the racialised aspects of cowboy or the story of how the word became popularised? I would think cowboy could have still been popularised in the slavery context despite not having been coined especially for it.

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The original claim also only referred to the usage of the term in Fort Bend County and the surrounding area

Well, the term "buckaroo" is believed to be an anglicized version of "vaquero" showing phonological characteristics compatible with its Spanish origin. The word "buckaroo" first appeared in American English in 1827. It's still used to refer to a certain style of cowboys and horsemanship, particularly in the Great Basin region of the United States, which retains characteristics of the traditional vaquero.

But to your criticism, the transition from "vaquero" to "cowboy" just reflects the influence of Spanish culture on American ranching practices.

Vaqueros and cowboys worked side by side so it seems to be a natural transition between the two and has much more support historically and linguistically than the complete lack of evidence provided by the article.

Words don't appear out of nowhere, they naturally evolve and generally are based on imported words and root words, and it makes sense that Spain, the ones who created this practice and imported these cows and horses were the root of the evolution, beginning from the latin root word "vacca".

I think both origins are probably correct at the same time, as you well know, Texas is a big place, and communications/movements of people were very slow until the 20th Century.

Black cowboy culture is kinda lost from the popular narrative - and cowboy culture was anglicized to an extent that the Mexican origins were also buried - similarly both mexican and black folks experienced similar kinds of racism depending on which part of the state they were in.

So what is the lineage from "buckaroo" to "cowboy"?

In side by side duolingo usage and then somewhat interchangeably .. so no real "from" -> "to" was outlined.

FWiW, though, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) predates Space Cowboys (2000) by a good 0x10000 years; this ties in Hollywood, westerns, two chronological points and binary.

I don't think there is a lineage it's believed to be the literal anglicized version of vaquero. It was another branching of the word vaquero.

The term cowboy seems to have occurred naturally as a less literal transition of the word vaquero.

I am not a linguistics expert though, there may be someone else that has more details on the transition.

I will also accept a fortification of the article's attempt at explaining the origin, but I don't see any evidence or attempt at providing any.

Also as I noted in earlier comments the word "cowboy" was being used in print in 1725 by that time and used heavily in the British Isles in the mid 1800s

Certainly the onus to prove their claims lies with the authors of the article but the claim that they are engaging in "race baiting" is also very serious and as yet unsubstantiated.

Many words that were in print in the 18th Century have since been used in different contexts and taken on new associations.

I cannot provide a criticism against their theory of origin as they did not provide any evidence.

Judging from the theme and tones of their articles and their lack of evidence in their claims it is of my opinion they are race-baiting.

That is a subjective view so feel free to interpret their motives as you wish, I will interpret them how I view them based on my evaluations.

That's totally fine if you believe that. I only took issue when I saw you in 3 different parts of the thread saying the authors should be ignored because the publication engages in "race baiting."

I am not ignoring it nor did I say to ignore it. I simply dispute what they said.

If anything I want people to read it and see how trash it is.

Just don't be caught off guard if you use a "fact" of theirs and get embarrassed for being wrong.

“Race baiting” is a fairly incendiary way of putting it. The way I would put it would be to say that there’s a contemporary fixation on race that gets naively projected into other times and places in ways that are anachronistic and miss a lot of nuances. There’s also a tendency to overcorrect for past instances of this.

The thing is, you can motivate almost any oversimplified narrative with mutually exclusive rationales. Maybe you claim that all cowboys were white because you’re racist and you don’t think black people had the heroic qualities necessary for herding cattle. Or you could claim that all cowboys were white because the evil white man didn’t allow blacks to settle the frontier. I actually think this story is more on the side of nuance: it turns out some West Texas cowboys were black, some were white, and people on the frontier didn’t have the same obsession with maintaining racial systems of social hierarchy the way people did in the Deep South. Some of them would still be racist but a black man could handle those differences the same way men in that culture handled many of their differences, with his fists. And when this particular black cowboy did that, it worked out fine.

The odd claim about the etymology of the word “cowboy” does sort of hint and edge towards a completely different totalizing mythology of “actually, all cowboys were black”, but this also smells like bullshit to me. There were almost certainly more black cowboys than you’d assume based on watching old westerns, but they weren’t all black and none of the people in that place and time comfortably fit into any side of any contemporary culture war anyway. They were different people with ideas and motivations of their own, not just symbols in your contemporary culture war.

Will you also accept that a word might have several roots? I mean, it's a simple word. It could have been created several times in different places. Also not an etymology expert but such things must have happened, more than twice.

Sure, if you provide valid historical and linguistic evidence.

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