"Ching-chong"

[Michael Newman]

Did you have
Eeny meeny miny mo,
Catch a nigger by the toe?

I grew up with "catch a tiger"  (in the early 60s) but my mom had the racist version back in the bad old days before WWII.

I think the loss of Ching Chong or Ching Chow is a small price to pay for the lessening of verbal humiliation.

Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu



On Mar 31, 2011, at 2:35 PM, Laurence Horn 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: "Ching-chong"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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>
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