"Ching-chong"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:52 PM -0400 3/31/11, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Wasn't his name "Ching Chow"?
>
>His observations were skeptical and ironic.
>

not to be confused with the beer of (almost) the same name.  I've
only ever heard "Ching Chong" in that [/___ Chinaman] context Wilson
mentions below, not as a specific cartoon philosopher. In fact, while
wikipedia tries to remind me of a quatrain that goes (or rather went)

Ching Chong, Chinaman,
Sitting on a wall.
Along came a white man,
And chopped his tail off.

I only remember the first two lines.  I guess we were just
half-racist, or half-assed racists, in those days.
Besides which, this is the sort of rhyme one expect to rhyme.


LH

>On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>  -----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>>  Subject:      "Ching-chong"
>>
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  This string was spoken on last night's Daily Show. Back in the day,
>>  _Ching-Chong_ was the name of a cartoon "Chinese philosopher." An
>>  article about Sweden in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that
>>  _Kipp-Koepp Kinaman(sp?)_ was the Swedish equivalent of "Ching-Chong
>>  Chinaman."
>>
>>  I really miss the olden, pre-politically-correct days! These days,
>>  interesting little factoids, such as the above WRT Swedish, would be
>>  suppressed in the name of inexistant abstraction: "social equality."
>>
>>  --
>>  -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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>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
>--
>"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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