Geocalumny

For the moment, geocalumny is a googlewhack, albeit a self-referential googlewhack (i.e., it doesn’t really count, since I coined the term, to fill a much-needed gap). Since the first instance (quoting from a John McPhee article in the New Yorker for 3 October 2005, and mashing it up with a Google map [9 Nov 2005]), I’ve noticed quite a few other passages that exemplify the highly-developed art of geocalumny (and/or the closely related ethnocalumny, linguocalumny, and general trash talk). Today’s beauties come from Madding Gerund and from London Review of Books:

(of Texas, ca. 1840)
…filled with habitual liars, drunkards, blasphemers, and slanderers; sanguinary gamesters and cold-blooded assassins; with idleness and sluggish indolence (two vices for which the Texans are already proverbial); with pride, engendered by ignorance and supported by fraud.
(Nicholas Doran P. Maillard, quoted by Mark Liberman, who ends the posting with an addendum: “I need to add that I don’t subscribe to Maillard’s description as an accurate characterization of Texans, whether in 1840 or 2003, and especially not of my wife.”)

and

(an “anonymous scribbler” annotating Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli, to contradict LF’s assertion that modern Greek is ‘undisputed heir of ancient Greek’)
…Nonsense. It is the barbarous pidgin of the Albano-Slavs who defile the land of their occupation with the deformity of their “dago” bodies and the squalor of their politics.
(quoted by Mary Beard in “Don’t forget your pith helmet”, LRB 18 Aug 2005)

This is very much in the “Wogs begin at Calais” vein that certain Blimpish Britons are sometimes thought to have invented. One can appreciate the spleen without endorsing the sentiments, right?

Update: yesterday there was only one Google hit for ‘geocalumny’, but seemingly this posting has provoked a few more.

Addendum: John Dowie’s British Tourist will please connoisseurs of musical variants of the genre.