People who didn’t blend in risked being made to feel like outsiders. They were given names that denigrated their backgrounds: wop from the Italian guappo (a strutting fellow), kraut (from the supposed German fondness for sauerkraut), yid (for Yiddish speakers), dago from the Spanish Diego, kike (from the -ki and -ky endings on many Jewish names), bohunk from Bohemian-Hungarian, micks and paddies for the Irish. As we shall see in the chapter on dialects, the usual pattern was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely assimilated—to the point of being unable to speak their parents’
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