"shambo" (was " Charlie")--Why "sham"?

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>As long as we're still stabbing in the dark, how about this? Part of
>the WWII stereotype of the Japanese soldiers was that they were short,
>had more space than normal between the big toe and the second toe from
>a lifetime of wearing thong sandals, and were extremely bowlegged, so
>that they had a shambling gait. These features were major clues to the
>source of footprints found in the sand on an episode of "Hop Harrigan."
>Hence, "shamble" plus "Sambo" = "shambo."

I thought about this possibility too. In fact "shamble legs" means "bow[ed]
legs" from way back (e.g., in MW3).

The "-o" ending is often nearly homophonous with "-le" as we discussed a
while back. But you don't even need that explanation, as "-o" is routinely
added to names and epithets (for a sort of frivolous sound, I suppose); in
particular "Jappo" was not uncommon for "Jap" during WW II.

Unfortunately, US newspaper search from the time of interest suggests that
the adjective "shamble" (= "bowed") was virtually nonexistent, while the
verb "shamble" almost always was applied to clumsy *and large* individuals,
and used something like "stumble" or "shuffle" usually, while what we want
here is something like "waddle" and the desired image is of a malformed
*and small* person.

However we're talking about a very uncommon and restricted term, so I
wouldn't rule out this possibility.

-- Doug Wilson