Ethnic-based terms of contempt

[Mark Mandel]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Alice Faber <faber at haskins.yale.edu> wrote:
> Wilson Gray wrote:
>> "Running on CP (colored people's) time" = "running late" was also
>> quite common, in BE at least, back in the day.
>
> Funny, when I was in college (early 70s), we used to refer to this as
> "Jewish time".

I was about to say the same thing, "we" in my case (and, I suspect,
Alice's too) being Jews among Jews talking about Jews. As Victor says
just a bit downthread, "It's mostly likely that this was mostly
self-deprecating ethnic humor,* so it is not surprising to see both versions."

* From my evidence it was indeed.

m a m

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