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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
One of the many other meanings of fore-finger... they are called by the
This week it is..... Chop-chop
the word chop is ‘to eat; to snap up’ English seamen Chopsticks.”
Be quick; hurry up.
This little reduplicated term has - that is, ‘to take into the chops’ (the This is in line with the original
its origins in the South China Sea, jaws/cheeks/mouth). It would be a Chinese meaning. The Chinese
as a Pidgin English version of the reasonable conjecture that this was name for chop-sticks is k’wâi-tsze,
Chinese term k’wâi-k’wâi. The the source of the word ‘chop-sticks’. which translates literally as ‘nimble
earliest known citation of chop- Reasonable, but not correct. It is the boys’ or ‘nimble ones’.
chop in print is from the English 17th century sailor’s slang use of Apart from in travelogues of the
language newspaper that was ‘chop’ to mean ‘quick’ which led to Far-East, there is little recorded
printed in Canton in the early 19th chop-sticks. The nimbleness of the mention of chop-sticks in English
century - The Canton Register, 13th Chinese in their eating without the until the mid 20th century. The term
aid of forks caused the seamen to ‘quicksticks’ however, did make it
May 1834:
coin the term ‘quick-sticks’ or chop- back to Britain in the 19th century,
We have also... ‘chop-chop hurry’.
A slightly fuller account was printed sticks’. William Dampier recorded as an imperative meaning ‘hurry up;
two years later, in a monthly journal this in 1699 in A New Voyage Round do it without delay’. John C. Hotten
recorded this in A dictionary of
which was produced by and for the World:
“At their ordinary eating they modern slang, 1859:
American missionaries in Canton The Chinese Repository. In January [the Chinese] use two small round “Quick sticks, in a hurry, rapidly;
1836 it contained an article headed sticks about the length and bigness ‘to cut quick sticks’, to be in a great
‘Jargon Spoken in Canton’, which of a Tobacco-pipe. They hold them hurry.”
both in the right hand, one between
included:
“Chop-chop - pidgin Cantonese the fore-finger and thumb; the other
between the middle-finger and
phrase for ‘Hurry up!’”
The adoption of the chop-chop
pronunciation was influenced by
the long-standing use of ‘chop’ and
‘chop-up’ by English seamen, with
the meaning ‘quick’ or ‘hurried’.
This usage dates back to at least the
16th century, when it was commonly
used in the strange expression ‘chopping-up the whiners’. This
• Authentic BBQ St. Louis Ribs and Tex Mex • Great Margaritas and Cocktails
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• Lamb Chops and Steaks from the Grill
in order to get them finished quickly;
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Which maketh them [Reading
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as they can, and to chop it up with
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This also gives us of the term
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a constituent part of the expression
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‘chop and change’. ‘Chop-up’ was
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