coon

plural coons

1. derogatoryethnicoffensiveslangslurA black person.

   And that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon! Who let all this riff-raff into the room?

   1979, Roger Waters, “In the Flesh”, in The Wall, performed by Pink Floyd

2. Southern USinformalA raccoon.

   1865, Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, Chapter IX. "The Sea and the Desert", page 187. He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels.

   2 more examples

   How about a glen bong for you and your 'coon?

   1963 Sterling North, Rascal, Avon Books (softcover), p 100

   ‘Listen, Mr Du Toit,’ he said at last, in an obvious effort to sound light-hearted. ‘Why go to all this trouble for the sake of a bloody coon?’

   1979, André Brink, A Dry White Season, Vintage, published 1998, page 149

3. derogatoryethnicoffensiveslangslurA black race traitor.

   Synonyms: Oreo, Uncle Tom

4. South AfricainformalA member of a colorfully dressed dance troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.
5. Southern USethnicslurA coonass; a white Acadian French person who lives in the swamps.
6. USdatedA sly fellow.
7. African-American VernacularA black person who "plays the coon"; that is, who plays the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.

   This is especially true when your audience has such high expectations of your playing the coon, and thus providing symbolic assurance that a darker people are contained in their assigned social "place" as "subpersons."

   2012, Mia Mask, Contemporary Black American Cinema : Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, page 123

present singular third person coons · participle present cooning · participle past cooned · past cooned

1. Southern UScolloquialTo hunt raccoons.
2. climbingTo traverse by crawling, as a ledge.
3. Southern UScolloquialTo crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek.

   There is a little ledge low on the face of the cliff, and by this with careful “cooning” one may reach a recession in the rock which makes a lovely arm chair.

   a. 1917, Roger Martin, “The Parson Goes A-Fishing”, Outing, W. B. Holland, volume LXIX, page 216

   2 more examples

   2 o'clock we float up to Duvall's landing—high bluff, store house, and a few dwelling houses. Here the fleet stops. Now for a canter through the woods, cooning logs, and waiding sloughs. Slosh across a small prairie.

   1957, The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, volume XVI, Arkansas Historical Association

   “Advertising” was one problem for frontier women. Another was having to “coon” across a fallen tree that had been felled and limbed to bridge a canyon or gully.

   1982, Edwin Van Syckle, “The River Pioneers”, in Early Days on Grays Harbor, Pacific Search Press, page 186

4. GeorgiacolloquialTo fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.
5. African-American VernacularTo play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.

   From the classic toasts to the dirty dozens to the early blues⁵⁰ and now to gangsta rap lyrics—why not consider it all just a bunch of niggers cooning for the white man’s delight and dollars?

   2005, Kermit Ernest Campbell, “gettin’ our groove on”, rhetoric, language, and literacy for the hip hop generation, Wayne State University Press, page 80

   3 more examples

   Rather than cooning or tomming it up to please whites...the black comic characters joked or laughed or acted the fool with one another. Or sometimes they used humor combatively to outwit the white characters.

   1994, Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, page 234

   If any other forties figure paralleled this humorous, graceful man in appeal it was the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, like the Trotter, funneled his extraordinary physical gifts into mass entertainment for whites yet remarkably, considering the time, avoided cooning.

   1999, Nelson George, Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball, U of Nebraska Press, →ISBN, page 52

   Then the warrior appeared, in a manner that was dead serious as a heart attack wearing a baseball cap. Then came the sidekick, a jet black madman dancing, and almost cooning out of the shadows that cancelled him.

   2006, A. Khaulid, The Great Book of Fire, Damon Hunter,, →ISBN, page 142

6. Southern UScolloquialdatedTo steal.

   Tris and his gang loved to prowl around at night, “cooning melons,” as Speaker put it in a 1920 interview. By all accounts, young Master Speaker was a handful.

   2006, Timothy M. Gay, Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend, U of Nebraska Press, →ISBN, page 37

   3 more examples

   Cooning water-melons [sic.] was a common custom, and young people would go out at night on such parties. To prevent any raids on our melon patch Grandfather set a trap alarm—which brought disaster.

   1940, John W. “Jack” Ganzhorn, I’ve Killed Men, Robert Hale Limited, page 58

   He kept on buying and selling horses, he said, sometimes paying for them in bogus, and sometimes cooning them. It was true he helped Malcolm Burnham break into Fred Able’s store

   1948, John Donald Kingsley, The Antioch Review, volume VIII

   In the summertime, at night, in addition to all the other things we did, some of us boys would slip out down the road, or across the pastures and go “cooning” watermelons.

   1968, Bill Adler, Jay David, editors, Growing Up Black, Morrow, page 200

plural Coons

1. A surname.