hixploitation
n.— «Plenty of movies—from comedies to dramas to horror films—have played profitably off these Yankee fears. To some extent, naturally, a bad rap for the South is justified, given its history of slavery, Jim Crow laws and attempts to squash the Civil Rights Movement that often included murder. On the other hand, movies are giving people a South that vanished decades ago, lazily assuming that these familiar images alone are enough to give some folks the creeps. There’s even a term for movies that trade in southern stereotypes—”hixploitation.”» —“Just south of Hell” by James Franklin Kentucky.com Apr. 12, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How do you transform ancient Chinese script for use in the modern age? English uses a keyboard with just 26 letters, but the first Chinese typewriter looked like a small table under a huge disk with more than 4,000 characters. A new book chronicles...
What’s up with ketchup? The shifting history and spelling of the name of this condiment. For centuries, ketchup was a fishy sauce originating in Asia—the tomatoes came only later! Plus, a new book shows what’s lost when a language dies: when there...