Quadroon

Words fall into disuse. Sometimes the neglected item is missed and pined away for. Sometimes, no matter how interesting it sounds, the word is not missed.

I'm currently slogging through the single volume edition of Carl Sandburg's monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln. In it I came across the word quadroon, which I had never seen before nor did I know the meaning of. I checked my handy, dandy paperback sized American Heritage Dictionary, to no avail. I turned to the Internet, knowing full well the Internet would never steer me wrong, certainly not the "Internet" with a capital "I." The internet with a lower case "i" maybe, but not the Internet. But I digress.

The Free Dictionary (free is always good) states a quadroon is a "person having one-quarter Black ancestry." I had never come across quadroon before most likely because in this day and age we simply have no use for it. In this, the time of Obama, while we each can take pride in our ancestry, we are no longer so overly concerned about divvying up the percentages of the various races in a person. Which is a good thing.