Poor Rick Sanchez.

In the middle of a piece with correspondent Jessica Yellin yesterday on his CNN show “Rick’s List,” he made a classic excited-Rick-Sanchez statement:

"He is the cotton picking president of the United States! If the president of the United States doesn't have enough of a bully pulpit to convince people that...a lie is a lie...what the hell is going on here?"

Before the end of the commercial break, Sanchez’s tweeps had piled on him with a vengeance, and he immediately apologized. "You know I didn't even realize it? I was just saying 'cotton picking' because it's a term that I've used because I grew up in the South...however, I apologize for using it, in case it was taken by anyone as an act of disrespect."

Desk, meet head.

Not to get all language-police on everyone, but just for fun, let’s take a little walk through the history of the phrase “cotton-picking,” and decide, together, if Rick needed to apologize.

The phrase “cotton picking” arose in the American South in sometime the 17th Century to describe a nuisance or something troublesome or unpleasent.

Keep in mind that in the 17th Century, cotton was little more than a garden crop tended by Southerners, black and white, mainly to be turned into cloth for home use, the same way flax was in the North. Cotton picking was hot, dirty, nasty work. It had little or no connection to slavery at that point in history, because wide-scale cotton cultivation was not really feasible until the development of the cotton gin in very last years of the 18th Century.  

“Cotton-picking” stayed in the language and eventually became a slang for “God-damn” or “damn” or any number of less polite swear words, and so it survived into modern times. It was heavily used in cowboy movies in the early decades of motion pictures, when swearing on-screen was still taboo. I suspect many of us first heard it in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

And this was how Rick Sanchez was clearly using it yesterday: as a G-rated swear. He’s the god-damned President of the United States.

(Now, in the late 19th Century and into the 20th,“cotton-picker” was sometimes used as a derogatory description of poor blacks in the South, but that largely seems to have died out with the end of the sharecropping system after World War II. There are probably some old racist geezers out there who still use it, but there aren’t sitting behind an anchor desk at CNN. There is no way you can extrapolate that more racist meaning from what Sanchez said.)  

There’s racial sensitivity, which is good; racial oversensitivity, which is not so good but understandable; and then there’s a knee-jerk reaction to what one thinks might possibly be offensive, so let’s assume the worst. That does not advance this supposed “conversation” about race that we’re all supposed to be having.

If I were the language police -- or rather, the etymological magistrate -- I would order all those who tweet, blog, or otherwise bloviate to have their dominant texting thumb pricked with a sharp tack every time they spouted off on something without at least trying to figure out if their high dudgeon was justified.

And yes, in fairness, my own right thumb would probably look like raw hamburger inside a week.