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“being in a pickle”: “The original Yiddish phrase (Zores und Jokreszeit) had nothing to do with pickles, only sounded like them (to German ears, like Saure Gurkenzeit, or ‘pickled cucumber time’), so that German speakers mistakenly started talking of pickles when they were in trouble.”
I love the ‘Chinese whispers’ between languages in this example.
“The idiom derives from the Yiddish idiom Zores und Jokreszeit (time of need and price increases) and was assimilated to the similar-sounding German expression Sauregerkenzeit (cucumber time)” quote from: The Language of Thieves: The Story of Rotwelsch and One Family’s Secret History by Martin Puchner (who also wrote the article).
Minor Nit: I cringe a bit every time a see or hear the use of "Chinese whispers" the US "Telephone" conveys the same message without the potential racial overtone. (I know in the commonwealth it's never used with intentional racial prejudice).
From wikipedia, it seems like there is one bad reason it might be called Chinese Whispers, and then a bunch of benign reasons it might be called that:
> Various reasons have been suggested for naming the game after the Chinese, but there is no concrete explanation.[5] One suggested reason is a widespread English fascination with Chinese culture in the 18th and 19th centuries - including that now known as Orientalism. Another proposed theory is that English people of the 19th century believed that Chinese people spoke in a way that was deliberately unintelligible, thus in their minds associating the Chinese language with confusion and incomprehensibility. An additional explanation is the commonplace observation that when two people, such as English and Chinese speakers, try to communicate with each other in their own language, the result is often confusion, and equally often amusing to both parties. A further theory is that the game stems from the supposed confused messages created when a message was passed verbally from tower to tower along the Great Wall of China.[5]
Out of curiosity, do you cringe when you hear the phrase "it's Greek to me"?
Perhaps its related to the large number of homonyms in the Chinese language. All TV is subtitled in China for a reason
Because they all speak different dialects (as a first language) but read the same language. Not because mandarin speakers don't know what's being said without reading it.
> English people of the 19th century believed that Chinese people spoke in a way that was deliberately unintelligible
Thinking a race of people are deliberately confusing and unintelligible isn't racism?
I said minor nitpick. No I don't think "it's greek to me" holds the same prejudice at all. Perhaps closer to saying "excuse my French" after swearing (also cringe worthy).
For one thing, that statement you quoted is completely unsourced. Sentences on either side of it are sourced to a book called "Chinese Whispers" [0]. It's a book about China, not about the etymology of English phrases. The author only discusses the possible origins of the phrase briefly in the introduction, where he explains why he chose that title for his book. He suggests the "Great Wall of China" explanation and the "mutual unintelligibility" explanation, but not the racist one(s). And he doesn't cite any sources anyway. It's just what he heard somewhere.
So we're left with just the fact that some anonymous wikipedia contributer says that this explanation of racist 19th century Britons has been proposed. By who? Based on what? Apparently not much. A different source I found points out that the earliest known use of the phrase in print is from March, 1964 [1]. Before that, it was known as "Russian Scandal" or "Russian Gossip". So it could hardly be the result 19th century attitudes towards the Chinese. If you're aware of any contradicting evidence, I'm happy to hear it.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with the racism explanation based on simply hearing the phrase and backsolving from their gut feeling that it was obviously due to racism. Then someone put it in a Wikipedia article without checking and now you're singling out that quote as an authority that vindicates your own initial gut feeling.
[0] https://archive.org/details/chinesewhispersw0000chub/page/18...
[1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/chinese-whispers.html
It wasn’t my quote. I was pointing out the flawed reasoning of the person who did quote.
"It's greek to me" implies that something is utterly confusing.
If "chinese whispers" has racist tones, surely implying a language is nearly unintelligible must be the same.
It's greek to me, implies you don't speak greek, there is no negative prejudice applied to the greek people or their language.
Chinese whispers the name of a game that information is lost/changed/confused (aka Telephone) as so helpfully pointed out above comes from the idea that Chinese are deliberately confusing and unintelligible.
I was merely pointing it out to raise awareness... and tried to do so without crediting any malice to the OP.
Ironically you're passing along a description of the origin of the phrase that seriously mangles what the person who mentioned that possible origin as one of several described.
The phrase "it's all Greek to me" comes from Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar:
"He gave a speech in Greek."
"What did he say?"
"It was all Greek to me."
Why latch on to that one possible explanation, when there are other ones too? As I quoted, there are racist possible explanations and non-racist possible explanations for the phrase.
Not latching. If you are comfortable to stand in front of a group of Chinese and explain to them what "Chinese Whispers" is and think you can convince them there is no prejudice in it. Then I'll stand corrected.
My personal experience, they find it insulting. Regardless of the platitudes or wikipedia links you offer. Again, I was trying to raise awareness. My apologises for deriding the overall thread of discussion.
> If you are comfortable to stand in front of a group of Chinese and explain to them what "Chinese Whispers" is and think you can convince them there is no prejudice in it. Then I'll stand corrected.
I would certainly be willing to do that, and the Chinese group in turn could mention some of their local analogues (because expressions depicting a foreign nation as unintelligible are found all over the world) that they don’t see as a problem – Chinese speakers are generally less concerned about ethnic sensitivities than the English-speaking world.
There is little prejudice in many of these expressions today. Certainly there may have been prejudice when the term was first coined, but the expressions then became lexicalized and speakers are not even consciously aware of them. To claim that they represent prejudice today is to fall into the etymological fallacy.
Can't comment on the accuracy of this overall, but there are a lot of mistakes/sloppiness with the Yiddish. The word is "tsore" not "sore", "shul" has meant school in Yiddish for a long time and not exclusively synagogue, and "und" is German and not Yiddish.
But synagogue can also means a place for religious study. In some Islamic cultures even today (e.g. Afghanistan under Taliban rule), a "school" is synonymous with a place for religious study--learning to read & write and even basic arithmetic is incident to the purpose of studying religious texts. Couldn't this have also been true of many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe? That is, "school" simply referencing religious study activities at the local synagogue, such that going to school quite literally implied going to the synagogue?
After all, in the West schools for children as we understand them today are relatively modern inventions--not just the details (e.g. the Prussian system), but the whole notion generally. Christians historically didn't emphasize literacy as strongly as Judaism and Islam.[1] In general it was something acquired at home, and when and where schools were eventually organized they naturally had a more secular character, notwithstanding they were usually administered by clergy. Few Christians would ever conflate "church" and "school"--neither place nor function--but in some other communities (contemporary and especially historically) such distinctions are rather subtle if not empty.
[1] AFAIU, Islam always emphasized literacy as a component of religious practice. But for the first several hundred years still maintained a distinction between secular and non-secular scholarship that we would recognize today. Then a sect of Islam erasing that distinction became predominate, achieving in Islam what many Christian sects have heretofore failed to achieve despite unrelenting efforts over the millennia. (Absolutely nothing new about the religious right trying to "put god back into the classroom". It's just that Christianity as a whole, especially Western Christianity, has been an outlier in maintaining a persistent theological and practical distinction.)
I forgive all.
The intermixing of languages is fascinating. I'm familiar with the phrase „Bock haben“, but was unaware that it originated with Rotwelsch.
This is absolutely engrossing! Thank you, pepys, for posting this.