"Ching-chong"
Laurence Horn
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Mar 31 18:35:32 UTC 2011
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
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> 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."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list