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hide captionA photograph of the river of pearls in Canton, China, taken around 1870-1880.
UIG via Getty Images
A photograph of the river of pearls in Canton, China, taken around 1870-1880.
UIG via Getty Images
It takes a special kind of actor to mix bombast and fatuousness to comic effect — think Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock or Will Ferrell in Anchorman. But the all-time King of Pomposity was the late Ted Knight. He played the role of newscaster Ted Baxter in the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Judge Elihu Smails in Caddyshack.
Aside from being a status-crazed schmuck, the Smails character is a racist who calls locker room attendant Smoke Porterhouse a “colored boy.” In a sublime act of retaliation, Porterhouse tries to destroy a pair of shoes belonging to Smails who is president of the country club. The judge, not knowing how the shoes got to be in their deplorable condition, huffily demands Porterhouse repair the damage:
“Oh, Porterhouse! Look at the wax build-up on these shoes. I want that wax stripped off there, then I want them creamed and buffed with a fine chamois, and I want them now. Chop–chop.”
I cannot think of a more condescending way to tell someone to hurry up than by telling them to “chop-chop”; especially, if the phrase is accompanied by clapping or snapping fingers.
Several etymological dictionaries trace the origins of the word to a version of pidgin English used on ships (and later by Chinese servants and traders who regularly interacted with foreigners. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first usage of “chop chop” in print to an 1834 article in the Canton (Ohio) Register. Two years later, it would also appear in The Penny Magazine, which was an illustrated English publication geared towards the working class. In an 1838 article, “Chinese English,” the magazine defined “chop-chop” as “the sooner the better,” but made no mention of the phase being rude or curt.
According to Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India, the noted Anglo-Indian dictionary published in 1886, the phrase originates from the Cantonese word “kap” 急 (which means “make haste”). In Mandarin, the word is “jí” and in Malay it’s “chepat.” This evolved into “chop chop” and was quickly picked up by the Englishmen that traveled the Asian seas.
The utterance “chop-chop” would also become closely associated with class over time, and was almost always said by someone powerful to someone “below” them. A good example of this can be found in William C. Hunter’s 1882 history of life in Canton, China, where he notes that “[w]hen a cooly is sent on an errand requiring haste he is told to go ‘chop-chop.’ “
By the 1900s, “chop-chop” had become an established part of military jargon, with the “chop-chop signal” included in the U.S. Army’s 1916 Signal book and with the phrase commonly being used to mean “hurry, hurry.” Former soldier Eugene G. Schulz described how army officers would snap at soldiers in his memoir of World War II:
“[W]e hated the obnoxious sergeant from the kitchen who stood at the end of the steam table who constantly yelled ‘All right you guys, get the lead out of your rear and keep moving. Chop! Chop!’ “
Like many other words and phrases that trace its origins to Asia (see ‘The Head Honcho‘ or ‘the boondocks‘) the phrase ‘chop chop’ saw renewed usage during the wars of the second half of the 20th century. It was also during the Korean War that ‘chop chop’ second meaning as a slang word for food or eating also began to be used again. (This definition is also how chopsticks got its English name.)
A 1951 article in the Baltimore Sun contrasted the two definitions noting that, “Chop-chop in World War II meant hurry up, snap into it, get on the ball, et cetera. In Korea, chop chop is most natives’ term for eat, and many GI’s are picking it up.” It should be noted that the Sun seemed to miss that ‘chop-chop’ was just pidgin English rather than actual Korean.
And during the Vietnam War, according to Gregory Clark’s Words of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese children begging for food would often ask GIs for “chop chop” and soldiers would sometimes oblige by throwing C-Ration cans to the children.
But it is the slightly obnoxious command to hurry up that “chop-chop” remains best known for today. The fictional Major Frank Burns uses it perfectly during “The Novocaine Mutiny” episode of the beloved sitcom M*A*S*H. “Chop, chop!” he commanded. “Get the lead out! This is a war, you know!”
Article source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/02/24/280186897/quick-what-are-the-origins-of-chop-chop?ft=1&f=1001