Origin of the term "cracker"...(Gaelic roots)

[Tanuki]

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-552

...."The true history of the name, however, is more involved and shows a shift in application over time. Linguists now believe the original root to be the Gaelic craic, still used in Ireland (anglicized in spelling to crack) for "entertaining conversation." The English meaning of cracker as a braggart appears by Elizabethan times, as, for example, in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this . . . that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?"

By the 1760s the English, both at home and in colonial America, were applying the term to Scots-Irish settlers of the southern backcountry,
From Harper's New Monthly
Crackers
as in this passage from a letter to the earl of Dartmouth: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode." The word then came to be associated with the cowboys of Georgia and Florida, many of them descendants of those early frontiersmen. "..... (more at link)

[tnlurker]

1. I first heard the term Cracker used to mean white people was

On this SNL skit with Richard Pryor

[Recursion]

6. To my ears the escalation is wrong

Though if somebody called me an Ofay I'd think "damn, I just got dissed by a really old guy."

I'd go honkey -> cracker -> white trash from less to more offensive.

[tiny elvis]

2. rascal was a harsh term at that time

dartmouth would have offended crackers in calling them rascals

[rustydog]

3. My understanding of the origin of "cracker" in America

was the blacks name for the white man, Those who cracked the whips: Hence "Cracker".

[tiny elvis]

5. an association, not original

not the original application of the word to the persons

a witticism, a pun

[WorseBeforeBetter]

4. Interesting. (n/t)

[tblue37]

7. K&R &to the greatest page. nt