slurs (was: Re: camel-toe)

[Herb Stahlke]

Except that the Swedish consonant would have been [S], not [tS].
Close enough, I spose.

An "Indiaman" was a ship engaged in the East Indies trade, and the OED
entry also includes "Brasil men" and "Dutch Indiamen."  Was "Chinaman"
ever used in this sense?  I don't see it in the OED.

Herb

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: slurs (was: Re: camel-toe)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To the best of my knowledge, "Chinaman" has *always* been right up (or
> down) there with "niggerboy," and "Jewboy." I wonder why "Frenchman"
> or <har! har!> "German" doesn't fit into this class.
>
> I read somewhere or other that "chink" was originally "Ching," a clip
> of "Ching-chong Chinaman." The funnies once featured a parody of
> Confucius named "Ching-Chong." According to a long-ago sports-section
> article about a Winter Olympics held somewhere in Sweden, the Swedes
> cheered on a winning (Red-)Chinese team by chanting (I no longer
> recall the exact spelling) "Kjipp-kjopp Kjinamann." The writer of the
> article noted that this phrase, which sounds like "Chip-chop
> Cheenamon" (according to the writer) is (was? I'm dredging up another
> memory probably  more than a quarter-century old, as is so often my
> wont) otherwise used in Sweden as a racial slur.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: slurs (was: Re: camel-toe)
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> At 11:15 PM -0500 11/4/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>>...
>>>BTW, according to tonight's South Park, lexicographers have agreed to
>>>redefine "fag(got)" as meaning, roughly, an annoying, noise-making,
>>>Harley-riding, loser asshole dying for attention, among other things.
>>>
>>>There's no longer any necessary correction between faggotry and gayness.
>>>
>>>-Wilson
>>
>> Speaking of redefinitions:  as part of our look at the semantics of
>> ethnic slurs, our seminar was reading a paper on "Pejoratives" by the
>> philosopher Christopher Hom, whose stock example is "chink" (vs.
>> "Chinese"), presumably because for the same reason that I switched to
>> "kike" for our class discussion.  One of the students who was
>> unfamiliar with the term opened her computer and looked up "chink" in
>> the OED [2d ed., 1989] and discovered that the relevant entry, for
>> "Chink", n. 5, reads in its entirety:
>>
>> Chink.  slang. A Chinaman (also attrib.).  (Derogatory.)
>>
>> "Chinaman" gets two definitions:
>> 1. a dealer in porcelain
>> 2. a native of China
>>
>> Nothing about "derogatory" here. (AHD3/4 actually gives virtually the
>> same entry for Chink and Chinaman, with one subtle (and I think
>> correct) distinction:
>>
>> "Chink"
>> Offensive slang. Used as a disparaging term for a Chinese person.
>>
>> "Chinaman"
>> Offensive. Used as a disparaging term for a Chinese person.
>>
>> But how long has it really been since "Chinaman" could be used neutrally?
>>
>> LH
>>
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>
>
> --
> -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
>
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