Relating to Senator Allen’s use of a strange and apparently derogatory term:
What does Macaca really mean? Three Virginia Republicans confirmed to the Hotline that several Allen campaign aides and advisers are telling allies that the word was a made-up, off-the-cuff neologism that these aides occasionally used to refer to tracker S.R. Sidarth well before last Saturday’s videotaped encounter.
According to two Republicans who heard the word used, “macaca” was a mash-up of “Mohawk,” referring to Sidarth’s distinctive hair, and “caca,” Spanish slang for excrement, or “shit.”
By a timely coincidence, I was reading an April New Scientist last night and encountered the following term:
“That name [o macaco ingles, or “English monkey”] refers to only one of the two species of uacari, the one with the bald red head, Cacajao calvus….”
So, I suggest that Senator Allen was referring to the man as a monkey.