"Ching-chong"

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wasn't his name "Ching Chow"?

You are correct, sir! The surname of that comedic genius, a giant in
the field, the illustrious Thomas B. Kin "Tommy" Chong, must have been
lurking in the back of my thinking cap.

As is probably already known to all, Chong did the voices of the black
characters in the skits. He wasn't very good at it, but he wasn't bad,
either. He couldn't do black "voice" worth a damn. But he controlled
the other phonetic features of black speech, such as melisma (FWIW,
IMO, the so-called "Southern drawl" melisma) quite well.

In one skit, Chong, in the guise of a young colored boy in the 'hood, asks:

"What about you, hippie? You want to buy a watch?"

He fucking nails it! Down to pronouncing the w- of _watch_ as [v].

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org