Becky

Becky is a pejorative American slang term for a young White woman. The term has come to be associated with a "White girl who loves Starbucks and Uggs and is clueless about racial and social issues", according to the Black Lives Matter leadership. For this reason, "Becky" is often associated with the slang term "basic" which has many similar connotations. In 2019, dictionary publisher Merriam Webster wrote that "Becky" was "increasingly functioning as an epithet, and being used especially to refer to a white woman who is ignorant of both her privilege and her prejudice." The term "Karen" has a similar connotation but is associated with older women. Origins In USA Today in 2016, Cara Kelly suggested that the term dates to the social climber Becky Sharp, protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair (1848) and the 2004 film of the same name. In Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Tom Sawyer falls in love with Becky Thatcher, with her "yellow hair plaited into two long tails." "Becky" is the title and subject of the fourth segment of Jean Toomer's Harlem Renaissance novel Cane (1923), about a white woman with two black sons. Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) features another woman "who will always be in a man's head", Kelly wrote. Meaning and use