Don’t tell Bob Smith that “Swamp Yankee” is a dirty word. After 82 years of living in Wakefield, Richmond and then Wakefield again, Smith — chowder master, grist-mill owner and retired car dealer — considers the term a badge of honor.

“I’d never get mad if somebody called me a Swamp Yankee,” he told me this week, his voice brimming with indignation. “I don’t think it’s anything derogatory, by any stretch of the imagination.”

Smith was one of several South County stalwarts I talked to after reading a letter to the editor in Saturday’s Journal from one Gary E. Pacheco, of Lincoln. Pacheco was incensed that an earlier letter writer had the “temerity” to refer to North Kingstown residents as Swamp Yankees.

“For those not familiar with the term,” Pacheco wrote, “it’s a derogatory name used by the so-called ‘enlightened’ city dwellers in reference to people who live in more rural settings in this part of the country. Though it may not strike people as offensive as the ‘n’ word, it ought to.”

Swamp Yankee, an offensive term? I’d thought of it as affectionate, and had used it many times myself, in conversation and in print.

Was I unwittingly slurring people I admired?

I started my search for the answer close to home, with cartoonist Don Bousquet. Bousquet — born in Pawtucket, raised in Richmond, and a graduate of Chariho High School — has celebrated Swamp Yankees in his drawings for decades. And, having grown up “surrounded by old Swamp Yankee names like Kenyon and Tucker,” he was astonished at the notion that the term was a putdown.

“Preposterous,” he said. “People are proud to call themselves Swamp Yankees. Swamp Yankees are the kind of people you can rely on. They’re the salt of the earth.”

His voice grew louder the longer he talked.

“If you’re a Swamp Yankee, it means your family’s been here for hundreds of years,” he said. And Swamp Yankees are like cowboys, like Gary Cooper. “They talk with a twang, if they talk at all.”

But when they talk, said Bousquet, you should listen. “They know everything about quahogging and chowder, catching lobsters, hunting, fishing. They can build things. …”

BOUSQUET ISN’T the only one who has brought the Swamp Yankee into popular culture, as a quick trip to the Internet will show.

“Swamp Yankees in Paradise” is a song from a 2002 album by a contemporary-Christian swing band called the Swamp Yankees. The Rhode Island-based rock band Foxtrot Zulu, founded at the University of Rhode Island, has a jazzy single called “Swamp Yankee,” which is also the name of a 2001 CD by the New Bedford band Pumpkin Head Ted.

There’s a 2005 murder mystery by Joyce Keller Walsh called Swamp Yankees, and it’s also the title of a book by Everett True, published just last month by iUniverse.com.

And there’s been actual research into the subject. Ruth Schell, in a 1963 article in the journal American Speech, quoted on Wikipedia.com, says it’s used predominantly in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, and occasionally in Southeastern Massachusetts, to describe “a rural dweller — one of stubborn, old-fashioned, frugal, English-speaking Yankee stock, of good standing in the rural community, but usually possessing minimal formal education and little desire to augment it.”

Hmmm. That last part sounds like it might be a negative. And it’s a point that also came through when I talked to Albert Klyberg, former director of the Rhode Island Historical Society, who has taught Rhode Island history at Providence College and URI.

“ ‘Swamp Yankee’ was used throughout the 20th century to refer to people who were rural and small-minded,” Klyberg said. (And, he said, it wasn’t the only term for South County residents that had a negative connotation. “In the 1920s, when the rural part of the state had more clout, Providence politicians made comments about the ‘skunk hunters’ of Exeter.”)

KLYBERG DIDN’T know the origin of “Swamp Yankee.” And he’s not alone.

“No one knows where it came from,” says Gerry Goldstein, the retired South County editor for the Journal who wrote about Swamp Yankees for decades. Goldstein has heard many theories, one of which was that Swamp Yankees were poor folks who went into the marshes to get their winter’s wood supply. “Whether that is so, I don’t know, but that’s the one piece of research that always appealed to me.”

Wikipedia, quoting Schell, says that some believe Swamp Yankees were the undesirable, troublemaking New Englanders who moved to the swamps of southeastern New England upon arriving in the New World in the 17th century. Another theory claims that the term originated during the American Revolution, when residents of Thompson, Conn., fled to the surrounding swamps to escape a feared British invasion in 1776. When the refugees arose from the swamps several weeks later, they were ridiculed and called “Swamp Yankees.”

That’s the one Rita Casady has heard. She’s president of the Chariho Rotary, which annually sponsors a festival called Swamp Yankee Days.

During Swamp Yankee Days, held at Crandall Field in Hopkinton’s Ashaway village, the cornmeal pancakes known as jonnycakes are for sale. There’s an antique tractor parade and “cow-chip bingo,” where four cows are let loose from a trailer on a grid while bystanders wait to see on which squares the first, second and third plops land.

“I’ve never, ever come across anybody who said they were offended,” said Casady, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., who now lives in Exeter. “And based on the attendance at the festival” — which has swelled every year, to a total last year of somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 — “I don’t think anyone’s ever boycotted it.”

SO IS GARY Pacheco right or wrong? Is “Swamp Yankee” an insult?

“I don’t know,” says Barbara Hackey. “I guess, partially he’s right.”

Hackey, 77, is a former president of the South Kingstown Town Council, and a lifelong South County resident — in fact, in her youth, she lived at the old Washington County Jail, when her father was a deputy sheriff. But she went to nursing school in Providence, at St. Joseph Hospital, and found prejudice there against people who lived in South County. “I think they all thought we were Neanderthals.”

So she’s heard “Swamp Yankee” used as a negative, and she prefers the term “native.” Still, times change, and negatives can become positives.

“People like to be known as Swampers,” Hackey said. “To me, it means somebody whose family goes back generations. …”

“It doesn’t insult me. But I’m very hard to insult.”

Goldstein agrees that Pacheco has some history on his side. But not the present.

“Yes, it was a derogatory term,” Goldstein says. “To say it equates with the ‘n’ word, I wouldn’t take that step.

“It’s almost complimentary now. …

“It stands for resourcefulness. It stands for using what’s available. It stands for not wasting anything. It stands for being self-reliant. …

“It’s almost a term tinged with humor. It doesn’t reflect the hatred and the prejudice that the ‘n’ word does.”

Many of Goldstein’s columns for The Journal were fanciful interviews with Peregrine “Perky” Spudd, an old man from Matunuck who knew everything about South County. I asked Goldstein what Perky might have to say about the term “Swamp Yankee.”

“Perky’s damn proud to be one,” he said, “and always will be.”

arosenbe@projo.com