Watching Hitchcock's 1941 comedy "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (no relation to the "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" coming this year with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), I was surprised to hear Carole Lombard describe an ancestor as a "slacker" who didn't fight in the Civil War. It seems such a modern word, but H. L. Mencken in "The American Language" from 1921 writes, "The word slacker, recently come into good usage in the United States as a designation for a successful shirker of conscription, is a substantive derived from the English verb to slack, which was born as university slang and remains so to this day."
In the movie, someone else describes Lombard's character as "white trash". According to this article on "redneck", "white trash" was being used in 1833.
There's an online dating agency called White Trash Dates. Meet keels716 from Tulsa.
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