"No pork on my fork"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Jun 20 18:21:58 UTC 2005


At 2:22 AM -0400 6/20/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Mon, 20 Jun 2005 01:27:42 EDT, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>
>>I walked by a Harlem restaurant on Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue)
>>and about 120th Street. A sign on the wall said "No pork on my fork."
>>...
>>Ludacris said this. Is he Jewish? That would be luda--crazy. If anyone
>>has any info on where this comes from and how it is used, send it along
>>but keep it kosher...Maybe I'll add it to the food section of my "Big
>>Apple" site.
>
>I'm going to take a wild guess and say that no, Ludacris is not Jewish.
>(Or was that an allusion to the line in _Pulp Fiction_ where John Travolta
>asks Samuel Jackson if he's Jewish for not eating pork?)  In any case,
>Ludacris might be referencing an earlier rap song -- Big Daddy Kane's
>"Young Gifted and Black" (not to be confused with Nina Simone's similarly
>titled song) from his 1989 album _It's A Big Daddy Thing_.
>

Or with Lorraine ("Raisin in the Sun") Hansberry's 1969 posthumous
collection of almost the same name (_To Be Young, Gifted and Black_;
Hansberry herself never made it even to middle age, succumbing to
cancer).   I'm assuming her book predated Nina Simone's song (both of
them preceding Aretha's cover by a couple of years), but I don't know
for sure.  (There's also a web site attributing the phrase to Elton
John, but I suspect that isn't quite right.)

Larry



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