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dago red

kahroba

Senior Member
Persian
Dear all
As far as I know "dago" is a disparaging term for an Italian, Spaniard, or Portuguese. Please kindly confirm if "dago red" in the following context, taken from "Charley Anderson" in "The Big Money" by Dos Passos, means a low-quality Italian wine:
Time: 1920s
Location: an Italian dump in NY
In the morning light he was sitting alone in a place with torn windowshades. Good old Paul had gone and the girls had gone and he was sitting at a table covered with cigarettestubs and looking at the stinging brightness coming through the worn places in the windowshade. It wasn't a hotel or a callhouse, it was some kind of a dump with tables and it stank of old cigarsmoke and last night's spaghetti and tomatosauce and .
Please note I'm interested in the meaning of the term in the early 20th century.
I agree with Starfrown that it's talking about wine, but I don't see that it has to be homemade, just cheap Italian wine. The etymology suggests that it originally meant a Spaniard (from Diego) but that by Dos Passos's time it had shifted to mean Italian.

dago 1823, from Sp. Diego "James," orig. used of Sp. or Port. sailors on Eng. or Amer. ships, by 1900 it had broadened to include non-sailors and shifted to mean chiefly "Italian."

Today it's a politically incorrect ethnic slur.
Thank you dear Starfrown
Thanks a lot dear TT
Despite the orignin of the word, in America at that time (and today, for that matter) "dago" would be understood by most people as referring only to Italians, and not to Spaniards or Portugese.

Dago red means exactly what you suggested: "cheap Italian red wine."
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