1st
To the Editor:
Andrew Hacker’s letter (Oct. 18) asks for the progenitor of the term “WASP.” He says that he first heard it at a Princeton faculty party and that he first used it in an article in 1957.
I could not persuade my son, Tad Friend, in his book “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor” (reviewed Sept. 27) to date the term back to at least 1952, when I first heard it. It was used upon me then by a Jewish girlfriend from Queens College, who socialized with young writers at Columbia University, who used it too. I therefore suggest that the term may not have a single progenitor, and that it may have arisen in such circles as a critique of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It was probably a simple term of cultural derogation — although Professor Hacker’s inquiry may yet find an individual claimant.
THEODORE FRIEND
Villanova, Pa.
Could the Jewish girlfriend of Tad Friend’s father’s who “socialized with young writers from Columbia University” please come forward?
(Best letter ever, obviously.)
