"shambo" (was " Charlie")

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:45 PM -0400 10/12/04, Mark A. Mandel wrote:
>"James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at AOL.COM> says:
>
>>>>>>
>  [Gerald Leonard Cohen:]
>>   Just a guess: ["shambo"] Seems to be an alteration of "Sambo."
>
>I hate to disappoint you, but "Little Black Sambo" was a Caucasian!
>
>In the story little Sambo has to deal with a pride (?) of tigers.  Now
>tigers are found only in Asia (any tigers in Africa, the limerick about the
>"young lady from the Niger" to the contrary, are in zoos).  Hence Sambo
>lived in India.  Now many Indians have very dark ("black") skins, but they
>are all Caucasians.
>  <<<<<
>
>Uh, Jim? We aren't dealing with ethnology here, but with etymology. The
>people who might have created "shambo" as an alteration of "Sambo" weren't
>taking their knowledge of the fictional character from ethno-geography, but
>from a then-popular children's book called _Little Black Sambo_.
>
My take on this is that LBS, the book, is indeed set in India, but
there's been a cultural reanalysis somewhere along the way, as
testified to by the use of "Sambo" as an ethnic/racial slur directed
at African- (not Indian-) Americans (and other blacks in Africa and
elsewhere).   Insisting that "Sambo" *really* denotes an inhabitant
of India is very much like insisting that "nice" *really* means
subtle and not pleasant, or that "aggravate" can only mean 'burden'
and not 'annoy'--what Mill called the etymological fallacy.

Larry