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
By the way, I’m completey failing to understand the meaning of the quoted comment… I assume it’s implying that “grub-handle” is also racist, but I don’t understand that either… Racist in the sense that it’s racist to imply that the Japanese would use a descriptive compound noun for the tool? Racist for somehow putting the Japanese and cowboys at the same level? I’m completely confused, someone help me.
@mollymooly: you win the thread’s no-prize!
—
Chop is standard for the verb “eat” in the English-lexifier Atlantic creoles
mordkhe schaechter seems to agree with this stymology, since i assume עס־שטעקעלעך | es-shtekelekh is his calqued neologism.
I’m completely confused, someone help me.
I can’t help you, I’m as confused as you are. That comment was baffling to me on several counts.
The OED has
ETA: I don’t see why that wouldn’t be the origin of “chopsticks”.
The OED also has the West African colloquial chop v5: “to eat” (1833). The etymology is “Perhaps a borrowing from a West African language.” Here I can see a temporal objection, since the last non-American citation for chop v3 is from 1701, but maybe the word survived among British sailors or others, or Africans picked it up from Americans.
Etymology is its usual mess.
I was given to understand that chop is pidgin from cap (Malay) meaning stamp, but which also is associated with speed in maritime terms (as in this stamp expedites your shipment, and somehow Cantonese was involved), and then it gets too messy for me to follow.
I note that 箸 is used in classical Chinese, but switched to 筷子 for messy reasons (probably those damn sailors again), while Japanese kept the character.
Huh. Kofi Yakpo’s superb Pichi grammar gives only chɔ́p for “eat”, and Ayafor and Green’s Cameroon Pidgin English grammar likewise gives tʃɔp, both of which accord with my Nigerian experience*, but the Krio Bible has e.g.
Di snek aks di uman se, “Fɔ tru tru PAPA GƆD tɛl una se, una nɔ fɔ it di frut dɛn pan ɔl di tik dɛn na di fam?”
Well, la-di-da is all I can say to that.
* Common in Ghanaian English, too, but I never really encountered actual Ghanaian Pidgin. Wrong part of the country, and I don’t think it’s ever been as solid a part of the Ghanaian linguistic tapestry as Nigerian Pidgin is in Nigeria. Twi is the main non-English interlanguage in Ghana.
Racist for somehow putting the Japanese and cowboys at the same level?
Something like that, I think. Maybe more putting even the best Chinese and Japanese food on the same level as cowboy food. An intermittently functioning synapse is suggesting to me that there’s a clear example where a slang word is or was used, in non-slang contexts, instead of the standard word to refer to something in a disrespected culture.
Perhaps a borrowing from a West African language
Oh yeah? Like, which one, OED?
(I dare say you could match pretty much any CVC morpheme from some West African language, with apparent plausibility, so long as you airily ignore any tedious details about the actual evidence or plausibility or possible pathways of the loan. I have had great success myself in providing Oti-Volta sources for words in European languages which are held to be indigenous by the evil Eurocentric comparative linguistic cabal, ever working to deny the Truth to the world.)
or Africans picked it up from Americans
The usual opinion nowadays seems to be that the West African English-lexifier creoles are (mostly) a sort of reflux from a Caribbean homeland, so American influence is not impossible. I wonder what “eat” is in basilectal Jamaican “patois”?
i know one corresponding word in jamaican patwa is “nyam”, which i’ve seen etymologized to several west african languages (wolof, i think, and maybe fulani/pulaar?). but i don’t know whether there are others existing in convivencia with it, or where to place it on the basi/acro scale. i don’t think there’s a cognate in trinidadian creole, which i hear about as much (maybe a bit more) in my neighborhood, but i couldn’t swear to it.
Re: to eat soup with the chopsticks
Compare Russian лаптем щи хлебать (eat (cabbage) soup with a bast shoe).
For no deep reason I’ve always assumed that chopstick cones from “chopped stick”.
Krio tik “tree” caught my eye in the selection I quoted. I presume that it actually originates from “teak” via some semantic widening to “wood” and then back to “tree”, but it does look temptingly like Bimoba tiik “tree” …
As I say, pretty much any CVC morpheme …
nyam
Nyam is certainly citeable from various Atlantic languages (e.g. Fulfulde nyaama); Wolof has lèkk though. The Volta-Congo root is *dɪ, which is remarkably well conserved in the family for such a short form (Kusaal di /dɪ/.) As far as I can tell, it’s absent throughout in Atlantic, one of the many reasons I doubt an Atlantic-Volta-Congo genetic link.
*nyam is an odd form from the point of view of African comparative linguistics, because it seems to be too widespread, with words of that shape mostly turning up as nouns meaning “meat”, and sometimes “game animal” even in quite unrelated languages. Kusaal has nim “meat”, and even Hausa gets in on the act with nama “meat.”
Krio tik is not from stick like trit from street?
Nyam certainly turns up in West African languages, e.g. Fulfulde nyaama “eat” (but Wolof lèkk.)
The Volta-Congo root is *dɪ, surprisingly well-conserved across the huge family for such a short form (Kusaal di /dɪ/.) It’s altogether absent in Atlantic, AFAIK.
*nyam is a problematic form in African comparative work because it’s too widespread, turning up in languages which even lumpers don’t think are related, usually as a noun meaning “meat” (rather than just “food”), or sometimes “game animal.” Kusaal has nim “meat”, Nawdm námgú “meat”; proto-Bantu has *-nyàmà “meat”, but even Hausa gets in on the act with nama “meat.”
Krio tik is not from stick like trit from street?
Yes. A much more plausible suggestion. I’m sure you’re right.
The entry for nyam in Cassidy and Le Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English, 2nd ed. (2002), has some interesting remarks and citations:
Also from Cassidy and Le Page:
that’s interesting! yiddish makes that distinction too, between “es” (human) and “fres” (animal). the (jewish nyc) english loanword use, that’s kinda “graze”, and kinda “gorge”, but i think only used of humans, is an interesting reversal, with “es” being more or less restricted to set phrases (e.g. “esn, mayn kinder” [eat, my children]).
and i wonder whether “nyam” makes a reappearance in the vocabulary of patwa speakers who live a lot of their lives in standard englishes, as a codeswitch marker. it certainly appears in business names in these parts.
Yam, says WAry, is ultimately “likely from Wolof ñàmbi (‘cassava’) or a related word” by way of Portuguese inhame and Spanish ñame. It seems to me that that exact localization is too optimistic, and not the best match. I’ll go with “or a related word.”
I have to wonder, what could ñàmbi have meant before cassava was introduced to Africa from the Americas?
and is there a potential caribbean/western hemisphere etymon to have been the source of one or another of those by arriving with the tubers in some form?
I can’t help noticing that chop is basically just nyam denasalised. (The Luo equivalent of this pan-Africanism is in fact cam…)
I can’t help noticing that chop is basically just nyam denasalised.
And that is why you get paid the big bucks…
Wiktionary gives three different senses for “chophouse”:
1. (now chiefly historical) An inexpensive restaurant that specializes in chops or steaks; a steakhouse.
2. (Nigeria) Any restaurant.
3. A custom house in China where transit duties are levied.
1 & 2 look like they ought to be related, yet 1 is transparently the same sense of “chop” found in “pork chop” and “lamb chop,” and it’s not clear that the Atlantic-creole sense of “chop” in 2 is the same as that etymologically?
3 by contrast is presumably from the sense elsewhere glossed as “A stamp or seal; a mark, imprint or impression on a document (or other object or material) made by stamping or sealing a design with ink or wax, respectively, or by other methods” or an object/device used to affix/create ditto.
I note “yum” (as in “yummy”) which Wiktionary’s etymology reduces to simply imitative, and of which Etymonline says “exclamation of pleasure, attested from 1878.”
Xerîb has already quoted the DJE entry, so I’ll add Allsopp’s Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage:
Back to cowboy slang, very loosely construed, consider the ablaut series “chuck*, chop, chow” as available synonyms for “food” with the same initial consonant cluster ..
*As in “chuck wagon,” but you can find uses of freestanding “chuck” to mean “food.”
Or perhaps the “grub-handle” poster was using “racist” as a vague term of disapproval to include classism or any kind of prejudice. Young People Today.
@jwb
Or indeed up-chuck.
nyam … vb (CarA) [AF — Cr/Derog] To eat (voraciously); to eat (sth) as crudely as an animal would
Whence, clearly, ‘nom nom nom.’
Xerîb: “I have to wonder, what could ñàmbi have meant before cassava was introduced to Africa from the Americas?”
I asked that question here last year. There doesn’t seem to be any answer. See there for Columbus’s use of it for sweet potatoes (Ipomoea) in the New World.
rozele: “and is there a potential caribbean/western hemisphere etymon to have been the source of one or another of those by arriving with the tubers in some form?”
No, see the discussion by Corominas in the other thread. Columbus had been to West Africa in the 1480s, and he brought the word niames with him to America. There were also Taino words aje and batata for the sweet potatoes (Ipomoea).
For cassava, the words cassava and yuca are from Taino, and manioc from Tupi; some of the African words may be from manioc, see the other thread.
German mjam “this tastes good!”; note the otherwise forbidden position of /j/.
FYLOSC njam/њам /ɲam/
合羽箸 — using your chopsticks to buy kitchen supplies
I’m still wondering why the suggested origin of “chopsticks” from “chop” meaning “eat” isn’t considered the leading candidate, and isn’t even mentioned in some places. It’s one of the possibilities at etymonline, but it’s not in the OED, Wiktionary, or the AHD. Can anyone think what the objection might be? Maybe that sense of “chop” was rare?
@Jerry F.: I assume that at least in part it’s because the more recent geographical distribution of that sense of “chop” doesn’t seem to match up with East Asia. Which is not actually a problem if you speculate that the English sailors/traders/merchants/adventurers who visited parts of the Chinese coast in the 1630’s and added the lexeme to English had just brought that sense of “chop” along with them from prior voyages elsewhere in the world. As suggested by David E., who also helpfully implies that that sort of sailor-slang 17th century global English is underdocumented, making it conveniently difficult for plausible speculation to be flatly contradicted by actual evidence.
I vaguely recall reading something about the highly-ethnically-mixed nature of lower-decks Royal Navy personnel in the context of the origins of the population of St Helena. I’m sure there must be actual literature on all this out there; I’m just not familiar with it.
I’m also now reminded of the crew of the Pequod …
@mollymooly: you win the thread’s no-prize!
Yes, that contribution is both witty and funny 😁
To eat (voraciously); to eat (sth) as crudely as an animal would.
Kusaal has two “eat” verbs too, but they don’t differ in quite that way (or in a way quite parallel to anything in English.)
Di is plain ol’ “eat”, with an impressive pedigree going back to proto-Volta-Congo or maybe even further. It’s a quite neutral word for “eat”, but it has a much wider semantic field than “eat”, often meaning something like “get”, of something that you are then intimately associated with. So di pu’a is “marry a wife”, di nyan is “get disgraced” (“eat shame”) and di na’am is “assume a chieftaincy.”
Ɔnb is more-or-less “chew”, except that it doesn’t have the necessary implication of actual mastication that “chew” does. It’s what the Israelites are commanded to do with the Passover lamb, for example. It’s a johnnie-come-lately word, only reconstructable to (part of) proto-Oti-Volta.
Animals do ɔnb quite a bit in the Bible translation. Dogs ɔnb Jezebel, and (less alarmingly) lambs ɔnb grass. On the other hand, the pigs that Legion ends up possessing were minding their own business peacefully di-ing before they ended up as collateral damage.
In fact, apart from the fact that ɔnb seems invariably to refer to literal physical eating while di doesn’t, I’m not at all clear what the difference between the two verbs actually is.
That reminds me of the Russian verbs врать and лгать ‘to lie (tell an untruth),’ which Russian speakers cannot agree on the difference between (see the Addendum to this post).
By contrast, the essen/fressen distinction is I think pretty straightforward in the languages that have it and the only issue is when one is used metaphorically and thus intrudes on the other’s default territory. But even then the “intrusion” makes it a marked usage where everyone knows what you’re implying.
The Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas was featured at Language Log a few years ago, with a few comments questioning the conventional “quick stick” etymology. There was more discussion at an older post there on Chop-chop and chopsticks: Victor Mair found that dictionaries are all over the place on sources for pidgin “chop-chop”, and cited Hobson-Jobson for “quick stick”; David Eddyshaw and Jerry Friedman brought up “chop”=“eat” in English.
Wiktionary credits a 2003 book with pointing out the chronological impossibility of the pidgin “quick stick” derivation. The last AHD edition, despite its excellent attention to East Asian etymologies, doesn’t seem to have taken this into account, as Endymion Wilkinson noted in another comment at the Log.
The journal of Peter Mundy wasn’t published until the 20th century, which is why it’s not cited in old OED entries, including chopstick. They do cite it in some recently revised entries, although by their hyper-conservative dating policy they won’t trust that Mundy wrote it when he says he did, but put instead “a1667”, i.e. before his death.
The second oldest quotation is from William Dampier in 1699, describing Tonkin, and he says they’re “called by the English Seamen Chopsticks”, which sounds like it was a word known to sailors and not necessarily merchants.
I appreciate the caution regarding how Mundy may have been an unreliable narrator of the exact timeline of his own life while it remaining certain that all of it nonetheless occurred before he died.
Sabir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
seems to have been to some extent a sailors’ pidgin, but evidently wasn’t merely used by Rough Seamen. It’s also hard to get much of a handle on, given the lack of much real information.
It’s of interest as the supposed forerunner of All Creoles Everywhere All at Once, according to the Wrong but Wromantic monogenesis theory of creoles. Stray Portuguese bits like Nigerian Pidgin pikin* “child” tended to get roped in to this unfortunately untenable theory.
No relevance to “chop” particularly, but maybe to sailorese.
* I like this word particularly because of the translation in (I think) Nicholas Faraclas’ Nigerian Pidgin of
Pikin gud.
“Children are a blessing.”
It occurred to me that (turning it around, and presuming that “chopstick” does actually mean “eat-stick” etymologically, and not something as woefully implausible as “quick-stick”) the Dampier quote might actually be good evidence against the OED’s speculation that West African chop “eat” is “perhaps a borrowing from a West African language”, as 1699 long antedates any British colonial ventures in West Africa or any significant settlement by Brits.
However, the British were already the main exporters of slaves from West Africa by the end of the seventeenth century, few though the Brits were who actually lived there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Company
And European languages at this time got most of their West African loanwords from slaves rather than unabducted Africans, after all.
Even so, it seems a point against. Not that it’s very likely anyhow.
On the polysemy of Kusaal di “eat”, I should really have added the sad ultimate fate of the Gadarene swine:
*****************SPOILERS*****************
Ka ba wʋsa zɔɔ sig bɛuŋin ka ku’om dii ba.
and they all run.LINKER sink lake.at and water eat them
(Bugum “fire” eats things too in Kusaal, but that one is a bit less startling from an Anglophone standpoint. Ku’om di X means specifically “X has drowned” rather than just implying submersion. Eaten X’s life force, maybe.)
Thirded.
David Eddyshaw and Jerry Friedman brought up “chop”=“eat” in English. [LLog 2013]
You’re kidding. Well, technically what you said is true and has nothing facetious about it, but still.
All this has happened before; all this will happen again …
[I was shooting for Battlestar Galactica here, but apparently the original line is from Peter Pan. O, the shame … although, I suppose that makes it kinda self-referential. Cool. Anyhow, not Nietzsche.]
@J.W.B.: I assume that at least in part it’s because the more recent geographical distribution of that sense of “chop” doesn’t seem to match up with East Asia. Which is not actually a problem if you speculate that the English sailors/traders/merchants/adventurers who visited parts of the Chinese coast in the 1630’s and added the lexeme to English had just brought that sense of “chop” along with them from prior voyages elsewhere in the world. As suggested by David E., who also helpfully implies that that sort of sailor-slang 17th century global English is underdocumented, making it conveniently difficult for plausible speculation to be flatly contradicted by actual evidence.
On “chop” in Asia and Africa, I’m seeing things differently. If we just look at the OED, which is all I’ve looked at, the evidence for an origin in “chop” meaning “eat” is better for “chopsticks” than for West African creoles. That sense of “chop” is known from the time of the first known use of the former but from that of the latter. Also, the lexeme is attested mostly from England, the source of voyages to both Asia and Africa, so there’s no need to ask how it got from Asia to Africa.
On plausible speculation: That’s all the other etymologies are too. Etymonline gives three.
1. Pidgin “chop(chop)” (of whatever origin) meaning “fast” and calquing the Chinese name for the utensils. The problem with that, in my view, is not so much that pidgin didn’t exist in 1637 as that there’s no evidence for “chop” meaning “fast” anywhere near as early as 1637.
2. “Chop(s)” meaning jaw, mouth, eat, food. The sound and meaning are unexceptionable, and the time is right.
3. “Chopstick”, in the first OED citation meaning a horizontal (I think) iron rod a yard long on each of whose ends a lure hung, so you had two hooks on the same line for your deep-sea fishing. The question there is why people picked that stick of all sticks to name chopsticks after. The only resemblance is in shape.
You might ask a similar question about suggestion 2. Here goes another speculation. “Chop” seems to be more like fressen than essen, especially suggesting haste. The complete OED citations are
Here’s one from etymonline. Elvira is asking her lover Lorenzo to be patient.
“You are for making a hasty meal, and for chopping up your entertainment like a hungry clown” [Dryden, The Spanish Friar].
Here’s the only one I found at Google Books.
(Interesting image.)
—Samuel Smith, The Ethiopian Eunuchs Conversion. Or, The Summe of Thirtie Sermons Vpon Part of the Eight Chapter of the Acts (1632).
Here’s what Mundy says about the way the Chinese people he saw in Macao ate:
Having before mentioned Chopstickes, I will Describe an ordinary Fellow, as boatemen, etts,, hiow hee eateth his meat, which is commonly on the groud or Decke. He taketh the stickes (which are aboutt a foote longe) beetweene his Fingers and with them hee taketh uppe his Meat, beeing first cut smalle, as saltporcke, Fish, etts., with which they relish their Rice (it beeing their common Foode). I say first taking upp a bitt of the Meatte, hee presently applies to his Mouth a smalle porcelane [bowl] with sodden Rice. Hee thrusts, Crammes and suffes it full of the said Rice with the Chopsticks in exceeding hasty Manner untill it will hold No more. They eat very often and are great Drinckers, Festivall, Folike and Free as farre as [we] saw. The better sort eat after the same Manner, butt they sitt at tables as we Doe.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Travels_of_Peter_Mundy_in_Europe_and/T3wMAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22chopsticks%22
So if “chop” meaning “meat” is the origin of “chopsticks”, maybe the connection was the speed.
I’m not saying (this time) that it’s certainly the origin, but I don’t see a reason for including either of the other suggestions and leaving this one out.
o tree! eat the fish!
Yú stík! Chɔ́p dì fís!
(Li gbin anɛ ye, “Tiiga, ɔnm ziiŋ la!”)
16th-century-et-seq. evidence for the phrasal verb “chop up” meaning to eat is not IMHO itself evidence for bare “chop” meaning to eat (not attested until 1920???), or meaning food, or anything else relevant. Obviously “chop up” could plausibly have been clipped for use in a compound, but that’s an additional step that needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed.
And in German, it’s simply Stäbchen. The Duden Universalwörterbuch claims that that is an abbreviation for Essstäbchen, but that is a word I have never met, and it sounds ridiculously pedantic to me.
16th-century-et-seq. evidence for the phrasal verb “chop up” meaning to eat is not IMHO itself evidence for bare “chop” meaning to eat (not attested until 1920???), or meaning food, or anything else relevant.
Actually, the first citations in the OED for “chop” meaning “food” are
That first one looks like “chop” means “dish” or maybe some kind of dish, maybe made from chopped ingredients, which would suggest a different origin from just “chop” meaning “eat”.
More on phrasal verbs later, maybe.
Bare chop meaning to bite *is* in the OED; maybe Jerry should have quoted sense 3 under chop, v.3 instead of sense 1:
The obsoleteness of this one after 1694 could be a point in favor: whatever “chop” meant to Mundy and Dampier, it had to be something that they didn’t think needed explanation, but Hobson-Jobson did.
I also think chops, n. meaning ‘jaws, mouth’ is a strong candidate, even if, in contrast to the verb, it’s *so* obvious that you have to wonder why the Hobson-Jobson authors didn’t think of it (Green has over a dozen citations before 1700, and dozens more after as well). You have to assume “chops-sticks” becoming “chopsticks”, but I don’t see any difficulty with that.
Most of the examples of archaic “chop” just quoted by ktschwarz would sound fine to me if you substituted “chomp.” Although the first internet-etymology of that lexeme I found doesn’t link it to “chop.”
It seems extremely probable that “chop” in the sense “eat” is derived from the “chop up” sense, and there seem to be pretty straightforward semantic paths for it to have happened. The question is how soon this happened, and among which group(s) of people (geographically and socially.)
I wonder if “chap” (in the sense “jaw, cheek”) contributed? Come to that, that word itself has a variant “chop” (as in “slap him in the chops.”)
The etymology of English “chop” (in the “cut up” sense) itself seems to be unclear.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chop
I nominate Mooré kẽbge “chop once” ~ kẽbse “chop several times.”
Actually, seriously, quite lot of words of this kind seem to have a phonaesthetic component cross-linguistically. One of my favourite exhibits of this kind of thing is Swahili kata “cut”, which actually has an entirely uncontroversial etymology going all the way back to proto-Bantu.
(Possibly even cognate with Kusaal kia’ “cut”, if the reflex of the non-initial *t can be finessed: compare Kusaal (a)tan’ /tã̰/ “three” with Swahili tatu “three.”)
@ulr: I remember encountering Esstäbchen (two “s” because old orthography) in the 70s and 80s, when sushi and Chinese food weren’t yet ubiquitous and eating with chopsticks was still something exotic.
Likewise in French: baguettes.
Ha, no, they were Eßstäbchen!
I know that word, but it isn’t used when it’s redundant, which it usually is – as in mit Stäbchen essen.
David E: chop/chap do feel like there’s a phonesthetic or onomatopoeic component. The OED (1889, not yet revised) at chop, v.1 also speculates about semantic influence from French couper, variant coper, which would fit the phonesthetics as well.
OED (2021) on chip, v.1, also not attested before Middle English and origin uncertain:
I must admit I was taken aback by this one:
返し箸 Kaeshibashi (also known as 逆さ箸 sakasabashi)
To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.
Damn, I always thought that was the way you’re SUPPOSED to do it! I’m not sure how reliable a list of taboos cobbled together with the intent of including as many faux pas as possible really is.
Also OED on the etymology of “champ” (whence “chomp”):
Certainly ending with a labial consonant is good for biting and chewing.
@DM: Schande über mein Haupt… you are right, I misremembered.
OP:
[Long and funny and interesting comment thread]
David E.: It seems extremely probable that “chop” in the sense “eat” is derived from the “chop up” sense, and there seem to be pretty straightforward semantic paths for it to have happened. The question is how soon this happened, and among which group(s) of people (geographically and socially.)
I wonder if “chap” (in the sense “jaw, cheek”) contributed? Come to that, that word itself has a variant “chop” (as in “slap him in the chops.”)
The etymology of English “chop” (in the “cut up” sense) itself seems to be unclear.
Du./LG. kappen looks like an obvious cognate, but you mean beyond West Germanic. I’ll vote for Lat, cappa, perhaps through a derivation like *cappare “cut a length of cloth”.
Chap “jaw, cheek” has a variant form chop. Chap and chop seem to be variant forms of eachother for every sense of either that Wiktionary knows. Another contributing sense might be chop “trade, barter” (presumably from chap in chapman) for what we now call ‘streetfood’. Anyway, a meal of small precut pieces is exactly what you will eat with a pair of sticks.
I’m surprised to see both David E and Trond calling chops (jaws, cheeks) a variant of chaps; I would have put it the other way around, since personally I’ve never heard of chaps in that sense, only chops — is this a US/UK difference? And chops I know pretty much only in fixed expressions: lick your chops, bust your chops; to have (the) chops, as in skills, comes from jazz, specifically playing the trumpet.
The dictionaries are aware of the tantalizingly similar Dutch/LG kappen, but how do you turn an ancestral Germanic *ka into cha?
I would have put it the other way around, since personally I’ve never heard of chaps in that sense, only chops
Same here.
You have to send it through French. Is anything like it attested there? “Late Latin” cappa only seems to mean “cap” and “cape” (the thing superheroes aren’t supposed to wear, not the landscape feature)…
but how do you turn an ancestral Germanic *ka into cha?
By breaking the vowel to ea before palatalisation of velars before front vowels set it, I suppose. As in “Chester.”
Of course, in reality, the vowel was always front. The word is a loan (from before Grimm’s Law applied) of Buli gebi “chop”, as seen in the Buli proverb (beloved of Jordan Peterson, and frequently cited by him in his illuminating lectures):
Nipok kan ko waab a geb zuka.
“A woman does not kill a snake and cut off its head.”
(This is why we should all model our behaviour on that of lobsters, who understand true masculinity.)
Trond E. said (meant to say) that chap and chop seem to exist as doublets in just about all senses of either graphic form. As for which form that happens to be most common in each sense in contemporary English, most are words I barely knew, if at all, and I generally have no idea.
(This is why we should all model our behaviour on that of lobsters, who understand true masculinity.)
I reckon you are all impressed by my vigorous handwaving
I tried to look up how that would work. The answer seems to be “probably not, but no guarantees”; but then, the same holds for Chester for the same reasons.
Maybe we’ll need to speculate about British Latin…
I would have put it the other way around, since personally I’ve never heard of chaps in that sense, only chops
When last seen, Yorick was quite chap-fallen.
Compare American “chomp” < "champ" and "stomp" < "stamp". But is "crappie" (the fish) just taboo deformation?
While we’re on the topic of ‘-bashi’-related wordplay, I found this on the National Diet Library homepage https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1305015 which plays with the double meaning of “nihonbashi”, 日本橋 (“Japan Bridge” https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E6%A9%8B_(%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%83%BD%E4%B8%AD%E5%A4%AE%E5%8C%BA%E3%81%AE%E6%A9%8B) and 二本箸 (“Two chopsticks”).
It features the text
美国の食箸は一本はし
神国は日本はし
江府の中央にかかりて
八方へふりわかる源にして
日本第一の御橋なり
万治元年のかけはしめといふ
Online translation services can translate this at least as well as me, but I’ll summarize that it first compares american “one-sticks” (spoons?) to Japanese “two-sticks”, then explains how “Japan bridge” is Japan’s number one bridge, a source that spreads in all directions.
Another twist to this story is that apparently there’s a theory that the name of the bridge actually originates in the two tree stems that formed the frame of the bridge (“ni” = 2, “hon” = counter of long things), not “Japan”.
Chapfallen! Good one!
is “crappie” (the fish) just taboo deformation?
This is Fish Hat, crappie has been discussed here before. The spelling and pronunciation are from French.
Thanks for the crappie link, ktschwarz.
Why am I singing “Fish hat, fish hat, roly-poly fish hat”?
(This is why we should all model our behaviour on that of lobsters, who understand true masculinity.)
Also, they’re tranquil, serious, they know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t swallow people’s monad.
For those unfamiliar with the reference.
An interesting question, whether Hatters are more likely to be unfamiliar with that reference or the other one.
I had read about Nerval and his lobster, but was unfamiliar with the quote. The song I’ve never heard before.
I knew the song (because my stepson is fond of it) but not the Nerval quote.
Water can swallow things in English, although it can’t eat them. (And things can swallow water, but not eat it.)
I’m not sure if drowning is required, though, or just fairly strongly implied.
Psalm 78:53 in the Kusaal Bible translation goes
amaa ka atɛuk la vɔli ba dataas
“but the sea swallowed (vɔl) their enemies”
so it can be done. And Naden’s dictionary has an example
amaa ku’om la zulimmi na nyaŋi vɔl o
but water the be.deep.LINKER UNREALISED prevail swallow him
which is glossed “but the deep water could drown him.”
But I’m not sold on the accuracy of Naden’s glosses; for example, the clause structure here is actually “but the water was deep enough to swallow him”, and I suspect that “drown” is overinterpreting the text.
Job 14:19 has a non-drowning eating by water, one that seems more natural to an English speaker:
ka lɛn nwɛnɛ ku’om dit kuga
“again, it’s like water eating away stones”
Another non-person gets eaten by water in Nahum 1:8
Amaa Ninive tempʋʋg la wʋsa, o na kɛ ka ku’om dii li ka li naae
“But the whole city of Niniveh, he’ll make water destroy it completely.”
though I suppose you might argue that that one is a (metaphorical) drowning.
@J.W.B.: 16th-century-et-seq. evidence for the phrasal verb “chop up” meaning to eat is not IMHO itself evidence for bare “chop” meaning to eat
(Slightly delayed.) That’s a point I hadn’t considered. I looked for examples of bare “chop” meaning “eat” from 1500 to 1700 or 1800 (depending on how I felt while searching) and didn’t find any, though I did find another “chop up” meaning fressen. I can’t think of any parallels that might suggest how likely dropping “up” would be, so maybe the derivation of “chopsticks” from oral “chop” isn’t much more likely than the one from the pescatorial “chopsticks”, though ktschwarz has a good point about the sense “jaws, mouth”.
German mjam “this tastes good!”
FYLOSC njam/њам /ɲam/
Russian ням, which is how you spell њам in Russian orthography; indeed ням-ням-ням is the usual onomatopoeia/ideophone for eating.
(This meant that the stories about cannibal tribes called Nyam-Nyam [vel sim.] were strangely relatable as far as the name goes, but now I’m surprised that it’s apparently not a universal ideophone. Surely the Slavic languages hadn’t gotten this from West Africa… is it another case of Scandi-Congo?)
is it another case of Scandi-Congo?
Almost certainly. Blame those gluttonous Rurikids.
nam-nam is speaking-to-babies for “here comes the airplane”.