Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 21:40:01 -0400
From: Seth Sklarey crissiet[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IPOF.FLA.NET
Subject: Re: the dictionary of stereotypes
African Queen (female who looks good), African King
(a male who looks good)
On Fri, 6 Oct 1995, Anton Sherwood wrote:
From: vitale[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dectlk.ENET.dec.com
Subject: Request for ethnic terms
There is a "linguistics" issue which readers of this discussion group
could probably help me with. I'm writing a dictionary and some papers
on the lexicalization of ethnic expressions. I began working on this
14 years ago. I've been collecting some ethnic expressions such as
Mexican Standoff, Dutch Courage, Chinese Firedrill, French Fries,
Swedish Ivy, etc.
I have a large number of these words and phrases (450pp single-spaced)
but the number of languages is small relative to the number of major
languages (approx. 6500) spoken in the world today.
If you or friends and colleagues who are native speakers of or
specialists in various languages can think of any, I'd appreciate a
list of these.
French kiss, Cuban coffee, Scotch Ice, Jewish lightning (insurance fire),
Canadian sunset, Russian hands & _______?, Japanese motorcycle boots (zori's),
Syrian bread, French bread, Montezuma's revenge, Turkish coffee, Mongolian
idiot, a Danish, Swedish massage, Irish coffee, Siamese twin (Thailandian
twin just doesn't cut it).
One night in a whimsical mood we decided to run through the alphabet with
euphemisms for animal dung, animal by animal, beginning with ape accident
and ending with zebra zippydeedoo. Its fun for a party.
Seth Sklarey
Wittgenstein School of the Unwritten Word
Coconut Grove, FL