Cotton-picking


[kot-n-pik-uh n] /ˈkɒt nˌpɪk ən/

adjective, Slang.
1.
damned; confounded:
That’s a cottonpickin’ lie.
adjective
1.
(US & Canadian, slang) (intensifier qualifying something undesirable): you cotton-picking layabout!
adj.

as a deprecatory term first recorded in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but a similar noun meaning “contemptible person” dates to around 1919, perhaps with racist overtones that have faded over the years. Before mechanization, cotton picking was the most difficult labor on a cotton plantation.

I drove out to a number of the farms near Denison and found many very young white children working all day in the hot sun picking and dragging sacks of cotton. In one field the labor corps consisted of one woman and six children, one of them 5 years, one 6 years, one 7 years, one 9 years, and two about 11. The father was plowing. The 5 and 6 year olds worked all day as did the rest. The 7-year-old said he picked 50 pounds a day and the 9 year old 75 pounds. (A good picker averages several hundred a day.) School begins late on account of the cotton picking, but the children nearly all prefer school to the picking. Picking hours are long, hot, and deadly monotonous. While the very young children seem to enjoy it, very soon their distaste for it grows into all-absorbing hatred for all work. [“Field Notes of Lewis W. Hine, Child-Labor Conditions in Texas,” report to U.S. Congressional Commission on Industrial Relations, 1916]

adjective

Despicable; wretched; damned: They’re out of their cotton-picking minds/ I don’t think it’s anybody’s cottonpickin’ business what you’re doing

[1950s+; fr the inferior status of the field hand or poor farmer in southern US society]

Read Also:

  • Cotton-press

    noun 1. a press for baling cotton.

  • Cotton sedge

    noun 1. (Canadian) another name for cotton grass

  • Cottonseed

    [kot-n-seed] /ˈkɒt nˌsid/ noun, plural cottonseeds (especially collectively) cottonseed. 1. the of the plant, yielding an oil. /ˈkɒtənˌsiːd/ noun (pl) -seeds, -seed 1. the seed of the cotton plant: a source of oil and fodder

  • Cottonseed-cake

    noun 1. .

  • Cottonseed-meal

    noun 1. cotton cake when pulverized. noun 1. the residue of cottonseed kernels from which oil has been extracted, used as fodder or fertilizer


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