'A Vulgarly Offensive Name for a Jew'

When I opened the front door to collect the mail I found a brightly colored business card on the welcome mat. That’s often how lawn-care and tree-trimming services advertise in Houston. Small businesses are big business here. The card is written in English and Spanish, as is much advertising in Texas. Against a background of blue sky and green grass the card reads: “Kike Tree Service.” My first reaction was to wonder who is the kike in question, the owner of the tree service or his prospective customer? Our neighborhood isn’t particularly Jewish, so why the micro-targeting? Part of me was appalled; the rest, curious. I know nothing about anti-Semitism among Hispanics. Printed next to the name of the business is Tenemos aseguranza, which means “We have insurance.” You’re going to need it, I thought.

A little research straightened things out. Kike, pronounced KEY-kay, is a diminutive of Enrique, the Spanish form of Henry. The one Enrique I know goes by the more anglicized and less prone-to-misunderstanding “Rick.” The writing on the card is perfectly harmless, though it reminds me of a bit that might have been written by Philip Roth or Stanley Elkin. My father casually used kike in conversation, along with other conventional racial and ethnic slurs. The OED succinctly defines the word as “a vulgarly offensive name for a Jew” and cites uses of various intents by H.L. Mencken, John Dos Passos and Vladimir Nabokov. The linguist Anatoly Liberman looks at the word’s possible origins.

I showed the card to a professor I know who is Jewish and who, I was certain, wouldn’t be offended by it or by me passing it around among friends. “What do they charge?” he asked. “Are they pretty cheap?”