glumshoe:

happyisayuppyword:

glumshoe:

People from Indiana call themselves “Hoosiers”, which is actually an offensive term for a hillbilly in Missouri.

It’s not actually an offensive term anywhere in Missouri except St Louis! I was born in Kansas City, moved to Atlanta, then spent most of my middle and high school years in Indiana, where it straight up was just the term you used to call yourself a resident of Indiana. Florida’s got Floridians, Indiana’s got Hoosiers. (Which, no one really definitively knows how the term came about.)

However, I moved back to KC for school and got married after I graduated college, wherewith my husband and I moved to St. Louis, which is where his family lives. And I began hearing Hoosier all the time. 

The reason for it is that in the 1930s during the labor movement, Anheuser-Busch, one of the bigger employers in the city, hired a bunch of non-union workers to replace strikers. These scabs just happened to come from Indiana. St. Louisians who lost their jobs began using the term hoosier in a derogatory fashion, and it pretty much stuck, so instead of using a term like “trailer trash” or “white trash,” St. Louis residents call them hoosiers.

god I’m sorry our state export is fucking union scabs