One of my favourite lame jokes (and I do so love lame jokes) involves a small tomato with short legs who is lagging behind the rest of his family as they make their way to a hot-dog stall. The father tomato, exasperated with the infant’s progress, eventually marches back to the baby tomato and, red-faced, stomps on him. The little tomato splatters all over the pavement while the enraged father tomato shouts: “Ketchup!”
The word “ketchup”, which thanks to US influences has become more common in SA alongside “tomato sauce”, came to English from a Chinese dialect, thought to be originally either Fujianese for fish sauce or Mandarin for eggplant sauce.
That’s according to the website ThoughtCo. The Online Etymology Dictionary goes a tomato step further, saying ketchup, first introduced into English in 1711, is said to be from the Malay word kichap, but is more likely to have come from the Chinese community in northern Vietnam, and before it became ketchup it existed in the perverted spelling form “catsup”.
The OED includes old recipes for ketchup/catsup, which include walnut, mushroom, oyster, cockle, mussel, tomato, vinegar, anchovies and cucumber. Not all of these figured in the tomato ketchup which entered America’s gastronomic lexicon in 1800.
Why all this talk of saucy tomatoes? Because we owe the Chinese a debt of gratitude for both the sauce and the word.
On Thursday, SA’s Chinese community won a case in the high court that upheld their dignity against multiple hate-speech slurs (read full details in this paper), which prompted me to look at English words and phrases which many people don’t realise were adopted from Chinese languages and dialects.
Ketchup is one. Another is “gung ho”, used frequently to refer to someone who in Afrikaans might be called “windgat”, in other words a braggadocious person full of confidence and macho bluster which might, in many cases, be misplaced. Lisa Chiu of ThoughtCo says the term gung ho “has its origins in a Chinese word that can either mean to work together or as an adjective to describe someone that is overly excited or too enthusiastic. The term ‘gong he’ is a shortened word for industrial co-operatives which were created in China in the 1930s. During that time, US Marines adopted the term to mean someone with a can-do attitude”.
“Yen”, which means a longing or a yearning in English, is falsely believed by some to come from Japanese, because it is the name of their currency, as opposed to the Chinese yuan. Who, after all, would not have a yen for millions of yen?
This, however, is false. ThoughtCo’s entry for yen tells us that “this term comes from the Chinese word yuàn, which means a hope, desire, or wish. Someone who has a strong urge for oily fast food can be said to have a yen for pizza”.
A gung ho tycoon could probably satisfy his or her or their yen for pizza, with or without ketchup, at any time of day or night. “Tucoon” in old Chinese meant “big prince”, which was adapted into the Japanese “shogun”, meaning someone who obtained power by force rather than inheritance.
Then there is “kowtow”, which is what most people do in the presence of tycoons. Ms Chiu defines kowtow as: “The ancient practice performed when anyone greeted a superior — such as an elder, leader or emperor. The person had to kneel and bow down to the superior, making sure their foreheads hit the ground. ‘Kou tou’ is literally translated as ‘knock your head’.”
I do hope the ignorant bigots who challenged the Chinese community, many of whom have been upstanding citizens of SA for more than four generations, are right now knocking their heads on the ground in abject apology.
There are many misapprehensions about the Chinese and their words. In English, a chow is a breed of dog, but this does not spring from the allegation that all Chinese people eat dogs (which is mostly untrue). “Chow” as a slang word for food or eating, comes from the Chinese cài, meaning either vegetables or a similarly edible dish.
Incidentally, calling a friend “china”, which is not as common in SA as it was in my schooldays, has nothing to do with the country China. It is British Cockney rhyming slang for “China plate”, meaning “mate”.
“Mate”, unfortunately, rhymes with “hate”. It is much cleverer, if you ask me, to discover reasons why you should be mates with someone rather than hate them for no rational reason whatsoever.
