From Nippon.com, a spectacular Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas:
From bad manners to taboo, there are certain ways of using chopsticks that are considered as going against dining etiquette. These various acts, known as kiraibashi, are listed below.
(Listed in Japanese syllabary order)
🥢 あげ箸 Agebashi
To raise the chopsticks above the height of one’s mouth.🥢 洗い箸 Araibashi
To clean the chopsticks in soup or beverages.🥢 合わせ箸 Awasebashi (also known as 拾い箸 hiroibashi or 箸渡し hashiwatashi)
!!! (Serious) To pass food from one pair of chopsticks to another. This is taboo due to the custom after a cremation service of picking up remains and passing them between chopsticks.
That’s just the start; there are dozens of them, and it’s fun from both linguistic and cultural points of view. I got the link via MetaFilter, where most of the comments are knowledgeable and/or appreciative but inevitably some are the tedious “ooh, how hoity-toity, fuck that” responses that for some reason people feel impelled to share. Yes, cultures have “right” ways and “wrong” ways to do many things, and they are often not “rational” — get used to it! Also, there is a comment that made me sad and gloomy:
Can anyone with more culture than me comment on the etymology of chopsticks? We usually say hashi in our house cause realizing ‘chop’ is an old cowboy slang for ‘cooked food’, chopsticks seems about as racist as calling a fancy spoon a ‘grub-handle’.
Nobody knows where the “chop” came from (see the brief discussion at Wiktionary), but it doesn’t really matter: people who are determined to avoid any possible violation of progressive standards don’t care about facts, random guesses will do as an excuse. The English word is chopsticks, end of story; if you want to say hashi, be my guest, but you might as well sing The Vapors.
The Vapors.
That refrain is 5-8-5 syllables. So close…
かき箸 Kakibashi (also known as かき込み箸 kakikomibashi)
To place one’s mouth against the side of a dish and push food in with the chopsticks.
I was under the impression that that is ‘traditional’, but déclassé.
Yeah, that seems like the kind of thing you’d see louts doing in a low-class joint, therefore avoided by the proper.
(To avoid any misunderstanding, I would be perfectly happy to be one of those louts in the appropriate surroundings; I use the word descriptively, not as a putdown.)
Calling spoons “grub-handles” is actually hilarious and we should start doing that.
“Hashi” is definitely a lexeme in my idiolect of English, although I don’t think I ever got my kids to adopt it. The internet advises me that in Esperanto it’s “haŝio (accusative singular haŝion, plural haŝioj, accusative plural haŝiojn).” And that “hashi” is a good Portuguese word (borrowed rather than with a coincidental Latin etymon), although in Macau it sometimes comes out “fachis,” adding the Iberian plural marker.
I guess for those unfamiliar w/ Japanese phonology it may not be fully intuitive that “hashi” predictably turns into “bashi” in certain compounds. I learned the patterns in the kana tables when I was eight or nine years old so the way in which ha->ba did not in fact exhibit quite the same pattern as ka->ga or sa->za even though it was marked the same way in writing didn’t faze me because I didn’t know what to expect.
“Hashi” FWIW turns out to be a good old Anglo-Saxon word (however you say that in Japonic) rather than an early Sinitic loanword. It separately turns out (I just asked) that my wife as her default family/childhood word for the referent uses the Mandarin one rather than the Taiwanese one, which is not necessarily what I would have predicted on a register basis but there you have it. (They aren’t even cognates, apparently because some regional medieval taboo avoidance caused Mandarin to adopt a euphemism that the Min topolects didn’t feel motivated to play along with.)
I initially misread the gloss of 回し箸 mawashibashi as “to eat soup with the chopsticks”, which would raise the interesting point of etiquette whether it is bad manners to do the physically impossible. With chopsticks.
Chop is standard for the verb “eat” in the English-lexifier Atlantic creoles, and it seems pretty obvious that that is the one in “chopsticks”, not Chinese Pidgin English “chop-chop.” Not that that explains how it ended up in the Atlantic creoles.
Kusaal for “spoon” is just diisʋŋ, which, boringly, is transparently analysable as “feeding implement.” The traditional custom, however, is to use the implement provided by the Creator, known in Kusaal by the technical term nu’ug. (“Right hand” is ditʋŋ, also transparently analysable – as “eating implement.”)
It’s not at all obvious why Atlantic creoles would have been relevant to the etymology. But wiktionary asserts that Chinese Pidgin English didn’t exist for a century or two after the first attestation of “chopsticks” in English,* so that can’t be it either.
*In the things-you-eat-with sense, that’s supposed to be 1637, in journal entries by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mundy That’s supposed to be about 160 years before the first attestation of “chop chop.”
It’s not at all obvious why Atlantic creoles would have been relevant to the etymology
I’m not suggesting an origin from those creoles for the morpheme in “chopsticks”, but a common origin for both that and the creole words. There isn’t any reason to ascribe the adoption of “chop” for “eat” in the creoles to interference from any substrate language as far as I can tell, so it must go back to some form of Highly Deprecated Lower-Class English, not itself localised to West Africa.
I think some of the less scrutable lexemes of the ELACs go back to widespread lower-deck Royal Navy and other sailors’ jargons. “Chop” for “eat” may well have been one such, though I have no actual evidence about it.
Tok Pisin, disappointingly, has kaikai, which is obviously from Austronesian, and thus no help.
The Dutch were more heavily present in the original chopstick-using parts of Asia before the English arrived, and the Dutch word is eetstokjes, which is so transparently functional that it doesn’t need an exotic etymology. Would it have been calqued into English using a Widely Deprecated sailor-slang synonym for “eat”? Assuming the current Dutch word is also the c. 1600 or earlier Dutch word, of course …
What about using your chopsticks in vain and unending attempts to pluck the single remaining grain of rice from your plate?
@JWB:
Assuming that the word really was in use in Oikish Sailorese, I don’t see why not. The downmarket character of the verb chosen would align with the general European* attitude that unfamiliar foreign customs were risible and/or just plain inferior.
(“Chopstick” is exactly what a speaker of Nigerian Pidgin woild call chopsticks if they’d never seen them before.)
* To be fair, “human” attitude, rather than “European” specifically.
What about using your chopsticks in vain and unending attempts to pluck the single remaining grain of rice from your plate?
The Japanese term for that is 物の哀れ mono no aware.
The remaining grain of rice is the universe.
‘traditional’, but déclassé.
I’ve see many of these lists of don’ts with chopsticks. Admittedly I’ve observed yer akshull usage mostly in the Sinosphere rather than Japan, but I’d say those so-called taboos are honoured only in the breach — including the allegedly absolute no-no of planting the chopsticks upright in the food to free up your hands (a funerary practice, supposedly).
This one I have seen observed (that is, avoided) at formal feasts
whose purpose might be to minimise spreading infection, except chopsticks give all sorts of pathways for infections.
vain and unending attempts to pluck the single remaining grain of rice from your plate?
As I understand it, the Japanese eat sushi as finger food. It’s only dumb Westerners who try to tackle it with chopsticks, and it always ends in clumps of rice scattered everywhere.
I’m a bit confused about the polarity of the items on the list
I thought you were allowed/encouraged to do this? Splinters from disposable chopsticks are definitely a hazard. OTOH using the provided plastic (reusable) chopsticks needs assessing how thoroughly they’ve been washed.
指揮者箸 shikisha-bashi: to wave your chopsticks in the air while conducting an imaginary orchestra
日時計箸 hidokei-bashi: to stick your chopsticks into the ground and use them as a sundial
エイリアン箸 alien-hashi: to stick your chopsticks on top of your head and pretend you’re from Mars
Note: for the entirely serious people here, yes, I just made these up. Hmmm… Maybe this is why nobody invites me to dinners.
And well made-up they are! I will definitely practice the last.
Admittedly I’ve observed yer akshull usage mostly in the Sinosphere rather than Japan
In my experience, the Chinese are far less strict about such things.
‘chop’ is an old cowboy slang for ‘cooked food’
I missed that the first time through. I suspect lots of Highly Deprecated Lower-Class English gets ascribed to cowboys in the US, whatever its actual original habitat may have been, but (if true) that may be another sighting of a descendant of ye olde slange word outside Africa.
(On the other hand, there were black cowboys, so I suppose it’s not inconceivable that they might have brought the creole word along. I haven’t heard of it in AAVE, but then I know very little about AAVE.)
@AntC re こすり箸 Kosuribashi, I did this once and my lunch partner asked me, rhetorically, if I was a truck driver.
Yeah, that’s definitely deprecated for Fine Dining.
One thing you should know about AAVE is that (on most careful accounts) by and large it’s NOT an English-lexifier Atlantic creole.* Not really any sort of creole at all except for being a variety of English which itself is said by McWhorter et al to be a creole, because Welsh or something. Cowboys from Alabama just aren’t going to talk anything like cowboys from Sierra Leone w/ similar skin color even if the latter have some interesting parallels with cowboys w/ ditto from Barbados.
*Gullah/Gitchee is a different story, perhaps.
Kosuribashi
I’d think that cheap split-your-own disposable pine chopsticks would not show up in Fine Dining contexts to begin with. That’s like styrofoam cup etiquette.
@JWB:
Thanks. McWhorter sees creoles everywhere.
So if this cowboy “chop” is actually real, it might help. The limitation to cooked food looks a bit suspicious though. It suggests that this might be just a lightly generalised cut of meat, whereas the creole “chop” really is “eat” in general. (It’s also primarily a verb, though you can use it as a noun meaning “food.”)
I have observed 海馬箸 – placing the chopsticks under the top lip to impersonate a walrus.
placing the chopsticks under the top lip to impersonate a walrus.
I have firsthand experience with that but have never seen it done, if you know what I mean.
@Jonathan D, Y: When I first saw this post, I tried to find a video clip of Carroll O’Connor doing the walrus impression on an episode of All in the Family. James Hong, as the restaurant owner,* snarks about Archie Bunker’s jokes having been the same every time he has come to the restaurant, which the Bunkers have been eating at for decades.
* Hong is an incredibly prolific character actor, with over six hundred credits according to Wikipedia. He’s almost one hundred now, and has been playing more or less the same mildly grouchy Chinese restaurant proprietor character since at least the 1950s, on shows as diverse as The Fugitive and The Big Bang Theory.
That was the grandpa in Everything Everywhere All At Once! I did not imagine he was anywhere near 91 then.
> じか箸 Jikabashi
> To use one’s own chopsticks instead of serving chopsticks to take food from a large serving dish.
As a semi-foreigner in Japan, most of the faux-pas don’t really annoy me. Except for this one, which people do ALL.THE.TIME.
I usually put out or ask the staff for 取り橋 (serving chopsticks), but often people misunderstand me and tell me “oh, you don’t have to do that here”, as if I’m trying to respect THEIR customs, not getting THEM to respect MY preferences =D
Oops, 取り箸, obviously.
Turkmenbashi—renaming both chopsticks after yourself