Talk:Joe Magarac

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Joe Magarac is part of WikiProject Pennsylvania, which is building a comprehensive and detailed guide to Pennsylvania on Wikipedia. To participate, you can edit the attached article, join or discuss the project.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

[edit] Croatian?

I came to this article when I saw it linked elsewhere exactly to find out if the word "magarac" meaning donkey in Croatian (and Serbian and Bosnian - the omition of these languages makes me doubt the motives of the editor who provided this info) had any particular meaning to this character or not. As it is now, there is a blunt insertion of this fact(oid) into the article, but there is no explanation, nothing to prove that this is not merely a coincidence, as I believe it most probably is. Unless somebody can prove an actual corelation between the name and the South Slavic word, I'll delete that insertion in a week or so. TomorrowTime 15:42, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I've cited this. The connection is that there were Croatian steelworkers in the mills where Owen Francis first heard the story. (According to the paper I cited, there are other Croatian surnames in the story that help pin down its origin, but it doesn't say what they are and I don't have access to the paper it cites on the subject.) —Celithemis 23:58, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

The mill section of Pittsburgh did historically have a significantly larger proportion of Croatian immigrants than of other South Slavic groups (based on neighborhood directories of the period listing multiple Croatian social union halls), and thus it seems not unlikely that it was drawn specifically from Croatian usage. -FZ 22:00, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

That would make perfect sense then. Thanks for the citation. TomorrowTime 20:45, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Too bad I have no way of accesing JSTOR from my part of the world. That looks like an interesting article. Sigh. TomorrowTime 20:50, 17 December 2006 (UTC)