English
Pronunciation
:Rhymes: Rhymes:English:-u�n|-u�n
Noun
en-noun
- informal A raccoon.
- context|UK|pejorative|dated|racial slur|slang A black person.
- informal A person who is a member of a colourfully dressed dancing troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.
Usage notes
This term is prevalent in the w:Southern American English|Southern American dialect.
Verb
en-verb
- To hunt racoons.
- context|colloquial|Georgia To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.
- To crawl by straddle|straddling a log, especially in crossing a creek, or similar, such as a construction beam.
#*1923+, author title and volume kept strictly confidential by Google Books, Outing, W. B. Holland
#*: 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.
#*1957, The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, volume XVI, Arkansas Historical Association
#*: 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.
#*1982, Edwin Van Syckle, The River Pioneers, Early Days on Grays Harbor, Pacific Search Press, page 186
#*: �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.
- context|dated|Southern American To steal.
#*1940, John W. �Jack� Ganzhorn, I�ve Killed Men, Robert Hale Limited, page 58
#*: 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.
#*1948, John Donald Kingsley, The Antioch Review, volume VIII
#*: 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
#*1968, Bill Adler (compiler), Jay David (editor), Growing Up Black, Morrow, page 200
#*: 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.
#*2006, Timothy M. Gay, Tris Speaker, The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend, U of Nebraska Press, ISBN 0803222068, page 37
#*: 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.
- context|AAVE For an African American, to play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.
#*1994, Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, page 234
#*: 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.
#*1999, Nelson George, Elevating the Game, Black Men and Basketball, U of Nebraska Press, ISBN 0803270852, page 52
#*: 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.
#*2002, Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-soul Aesthetic, Routledge, ISBN 0415926572, page 183
#*: Students even recoiled from the film�s opening segments, which featured the late �Scatman� Crothers singing �I Got the Devil in Me,� looking and sounding as if he had just walked off the set of an early 1930s plantation film. Of course Crothers was a remnant of an earlier era when black performers shucked, jived, cooned, and tapped for their two-minutes of fame<!--,-->
#*2003, Adrienne Anderson, Word, Rap, Politics and Feminism, iUniverse, ISBN 0595270360, page 75
#*: Videos shown on these stations...become a microcosm of same issues that are going on in the Black community.... We�re smack dab into a new millennium and we�re still dealing with an antiquated color caste, sexism, and cooning.
#*2004, J. Ronald Green, With a Crooked Stick� The Films of Oscar Micheaux, Indiana University Press, ISBN 0253217156, page
#*: In the next sequence, one of Ted�s assistant producers has �picked up a couple of boys in Harlem� who do a song-and-dance number. A preadolescent boy performs a broad-smiling, eye-rolling �cooning� act that is embarrassingly exaggerated.
#*2005, Kermit Ernest Campbell, �gettin� our groove on�<!--quotations in title-->, rhetoric, language, and literacy for the hip hop generation, Wayne State University Press, ISBN 081432925X, page 80
#*: From the classic toasts to the dirty dozens to the early blues<sup>50</sup> 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?
#*2006, A. Khaulid, The Great Book of Fire, Damon Hunter, ISBN 1427602417, page 142
#*: 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.
Derived terms
coon it
Quotations
1849, John [illegible], A History of Wonderful Inventions, Harper & Brothers, New York, page 33
1868, Putnam's Magazine, Original Papers on Literature, Science, Art, and National Interests, G. P. Putnam & Son, page 455
1949, Harvey Elmer Tobie, No Man Like Joe: The Life and Times of Joseph L. Meek, Oregon Historical Society, Binfords & Mort
1978, Thomas Augustus Gallagher, The Movies of John Ford, Columbia University, page 416
References
2005, John R. Waldman, 100 Weird Ways to Catch Fish, Stackpole Books, ISBN 0811731790
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