I am not going to go on about the word Paki, though it has an interesting enough history. But when I used the word Spaniard recently, my husband asked: ‘Are you allowed to say that these days?’ I wondered, until I heard a Spaniard use it himself on Radio 4. So it must be all right. A cause for unease at this designation of Spanish people is the connotation of the suffix -ard. Consider these examples: bastard, coward, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, braggard, stinkard. Neither mallard nor wizard are very strong counter-examples, the first coming from the word male (though female ducks of this kind exist too), and the second being once as pejorative as witch.
It makes no difference that the element -ard comes from the Germanic hard, meaning ‘strong’ (hence its popularity in names such as Richard, ‘power-strong’, Reynard, ‘advice-strong’, or Everard, ‘boar-strong’). Words do not mean now what their etymological ancestors once meant. If it comes to that, the Germanic hard is related to the Greek kratos, from which we derive democrat and aristocrat.
Spaniard is not found in English before 1400, by which time -ard was freely used without much force in words such as placard and standard. It merely gave a substantive form to someone otherwise called a ‘Spanish man’. A woman can hardly be called a Spaniard; Spaniardess is only used jocularly, and the joke is feeble enough.
Spaniard is what the Spanish call a gentilicio, the designation of an inhabitant. They have a weakness for this nominal form, which can sound a little fanciful, so that an inhabitant of Madrid is a madrileño; of Cadiz a gaditano; of Burgos a burgales; of Avila an abulense; of Betanzos a brigantino. It is no worse than our Liverpudlian (a usage first found in the 1830s), Mancunian (1904), Geordie (1866); or Glaswegian (1818).
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