Quote:
Originally Posted by MrsJoseph
I would say you are 99% right. "Injun" would be considered a dialect spelling, not so much an insult. The insult would be "redskin" or "red" in the south. I can assume that someone can and will be offended by "injun" if they happen to hear it, but if they hear it in the south, 9 times out of 10 the speaker was saying "Indian" (in their own way).
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So, depending in which era and state someone was living, if they shouted, "There's a red under the bed", upon opening their front door they might be faced with either a lynch-mob, the FBI, or a CSI forensics team - having misheard "there's red" - arriving to determine its nature. The subtleties of the English language never cease to astound me.