(Old) sames

[Benjamin Barrett]

Lisa See's 2005 novel "Snow Blossom and the Secret Fan" was made into a movie in 2011, popularizing the calque "old sames" from the Chinese 老同 (lǎotóng). The novel also uses "same/sames" to refer to old sames. I don't see any hits on Google that predates her novel.

Wikipedia has an article on laotong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laotong), but the AHD, Wiktionary and the Oxford Dictionary site do not mention this word or such a noun meaning for "same."

I looked through just eight pages of Google hits and found only a few hits using the word without direct reference to See's work:

1. Pinterest has an entry on my old sames (http://www.pinterest.com/myoldsames/), which seems to mean something like "women (whose interests) I identify with."

2. http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Get-to-Know-Book-Clubs has an Old Sames Book Club, which extends/weakens the meaning of "old sames": We have grown closer through our love of books and truly feel connected like sisters, or like "old sames."

3. https://kchenelle.wordpress.com/tag/old-sames/ has two non-Chinese women that are old sames, dated 2013.

4. http://word4that.com/2014/06/20/laotong-n/ also features "laotong" in a "there's a word for that" entry.

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/home

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