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The exact history and origin of the term is debated. [7] According to one theory, it is an agent noun derived from the verb crack, meaning "to boast". [8] The use of cracker to mean "braggart" dates back to the 16th century and can be seen for example in William Shakespeare's King John (c. 1595): "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"
The term cracker was in use during the Elizabethan era to describe braggarts and blowhards. The original root of this is the Middle English word crack, meaning "entertaining conversation" (which survives as a verb, as in "to crack a joke"); the noun in the Gaelicized spelling craic also retains currency in Ireland and to some extent in Scotland and Northern England, in a sense of 'fun' or ...
The term "cracker" was in use during Elizabethan times to describe braggarts. The original root of this is the Middle English word crack meaning "entertaining conversation" (One may be said to "crack" a joke; a witty remark is a "wisecrack"). This term and the Gaelic spelling "craic" are still in use in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland.
The second more direct origin of the current usage comes from 1914 when James Joyce used the Irish slang gas to describe joking or frivolity. During the "Jazz Age," the expression was picked up by ...
Cracker: In the United States, the use of "cracker" as a pejorative term for a white person does not come from the use of bullwhips by whites against slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. The term comes from an old sense of "boaster" or "braggart"; alternatively, it may come from "corn-cracker". [15]
The name is derived from "tack", the British sailor slang for food. The earliest use of the term recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1830. [3]It is known by other names including brewis (possibly a cognate with "brose"), cabin bread, pilot bread, sea biscuit, soda crackers, sea bread (as rations for sailors), ship's biscuit, and pejoratively as dog biscuits, molar breakers, sheet ...
American businesses were quick to pick up the slack and companies like Stauffer's Biscuit Company, which still exists today, made their first animal crackers in 1871 out of York, PA.
Barnum's Animal Crackers In 2018, Nabisco made headlines over a design change in its boxes of Barnum's animal crackers, abandoning its 116-year-old "circus cage" design to show the animals roaming ...