July 31, 1997

maroon

In Bugs Bunny cartoons, the "wascally wabbit" sometimes refers to stupid people as "maroons," as in "What a maroon!" I'm wondering if this put-down has a racist genesis and what, if anything, it has to do with being "marooned" on a desert island.

It is neither racist nor related to maroon 'to abandon' (though this word does originally refer to fugitive slaves), except through their identical pronunciation.

The word maroon 'an foolish or obnoxious person' is simply a jocular mispronunciation of moron. It is probably reinforced by the existence of maroon 'abandon' and maroon 'brownish red color' (which are themselves unrelated, by the way, giving us three different unrelated maroons).

Our maroon is first found in the 1940s, and was not coined by Bugs Bunny (though his use of it surely did a great deal to popularize the term). It is part of a number of words from that general period which represent jocular mispronunciations of common words. Some other exampes are anyhoo, fox paw (for faux pas), martooni, and nertz.