Coonname

• 1

  A surname.

coonnoun/kun/

• 1

  offensivederogatoryslurslangA black person.

  • And that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon! Who let all this riff-raff into the room?
• 2

  informalA raccoon.

  • 1865, Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, Chapter IX. "The Sea and the Desert", page 187. He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels.
  • How about a glen bong for you and your 'coon?
• 3

  offensivederogatoryslurslangA black race traitor.

• 4

  informalA member of a colorfully dressed dance troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.

• 5

  slurA coonass; a white Acadian French person who lives in the swamps.

• 6

  datedA sly fellow.

• 7

  A black person who "plays the coon"; that is, who plays the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.

  • This is especially true when your audience has such high expectations of your playing the coon, and thus providing symbolic assurance that a darker people are contained in their assigned social "place" as "subpersons."

coonverb/kun/

• 1

  To hunt raccoons.

• 2

  climbinghobbieslifestyleTo traverse by crawling, as a ledge.

• 3

  To crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek.

  • There is a little ledge low on the face of the cliff, and by this with careful “cooning” one may reach a recession in the rock which makes a lovely arm chair.
  • 2 o'clock we float up to Duvall's landing—high bluff, store house, and a few dwelling houses. Here the fleet stops. Now for a canter through the woods, cooning logs, and waiding sloughs. Slosh across a small prairie.
• 4

  To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.

• 5

  To play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.

  • Rather than cooning or tomming it up to please whites...the black comic characters joked or laughed or acted the fool with one another. Or sometimes they used humor combatively to outwit the white characters.
  • If any other forties figure paralleled this humorous, graceful man in appeal it was the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, like the Trotter, funneled his extraordinary physical gifts into mass entertainment for whites yet remarkably, considering the time, avoided cooning.
• 6

  datedTo steal.

  • Cooning water-melons [sic.] was a common custom, and young people would go out at night on such parties. To prevent any raids on our melon patch Grandfather set a trap alarm—which brought disaster.
  • He kept on buying and selling horses, he said, sometimes paying for them in bogus, and sometimes cooning them. It was true he helped Malcolm Burnham break into Fred Able’s store