cotton picking
Fiber harvest work
Cotton picking refers literally to the labor-intensive harvest of cotton by hand, historically performed by enslaved people and later sharecroppers in the American South.
The phrase survives mainly as a mild oath or intensifier: Get your cotton-picking hands off that!
Wait just a cotton-picking minute!
The expression sanitizes its origins but retains associations with frustration and impatience.
Some consider it offensive given its history; others use it unaware of the connection.
- harvestGathering mature crops
- plantationLarge-scale farming operation
- fieldArea of specialty
- bollsSeed-containing plant pods
- whiteAbsence of pigment
fluffy · labor · south · slavery · sharecropping · gin · textile · fiber · sweat · rows · sack · hard labor · humid · sun up · backbreaking · agriculture · crop · hands
- harvestreaping, fall harvest, wheat sheaf, reaper, reap
- manual laborfarming, lifting, carrying, shoveling, loading
- gathering activitiesforaging, mushroom hunting, herb gathering, firewood gathering, gleaning
- harvestingreaping, gathering, collecting, plucking, handpicking
- ___ picking
- Pickingplucking, grape harvesting, herb gathering