moon cricket en · NOUN
Etymology
From moon + cricket. Perhaps a reference to slaves singing songs during the night.
Meanings
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(US, ethnic, slang, slur) A black person.
Rooney Baxter, The Bluegrass Kid (page 182), 2015. They don't have a good enough reason to come at us now. And besides, moon crickets do drive-bys. This feels like a message from someone else.
Quoted in 2020, Leslie Picca, Joe Feagin, Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage When we were leaving it was getting dark and my husband says to me “look at all of those moon crickets.” I confusingly asked him what he had meant by that. When we got into the car, he explained to me that all of the black people walking around under the moonlight look like a bunch of crickets scurrying around.
Her Dad had been someone her Mom didn't know in Houston. I always used to joke, "Maybe he was a Moon-Cricket from Alabama," but Trish is totally not black.
2018, Tzvi Peckar III, Mini Thins, page 285:
Forms
| Spelling | Features | Labels | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| moon crickets | Number=Plur | lexicographic | |
| moon-cricket | alternative | lexicographic | |
| mooncricket | alternative | lexicographic |