Re: RARA-AVIS: The Op and San Francisco

From: Stewart Wilson ( stewart@stewartwilson.com)
Date: 29 Oct 2001


William Denton wrote:
> (...) me, or because I'm a shine Indian." I know "shine" is an old disparaging
> term for blacks, but I just can't figure out what it means here.

Yet another non-authoritative theory: "shine" also means "trick". I take "shine indian" to simply mean a non-indian, without any specific reference to moonshine, shoeshine, or film casting practices of the 1920s. That is, "shine" by itself is the now-odd usage, and "shine indian" is not an expression. To me that reading is most in character for the Op.

--Stewart

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Oct 2001 EST