search this site
— Nippertipping & Bumsicle —
Nippertipping Nippertipping is a recent Canadian coinage, a racist term that describes pushing an Asian fisherman off an Ontario dock or bridge or riverbank into the water, chiefly because he or she is Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese. A spate of such welcomes occurred in Ontario recently. In 2007, police hate-crime units investigated incidents near Lake Simcoe and near Kingston, Ontario. A small Asian boy was tossed into a lake. Under cover of night, a car chased four Asian fishermen and a white companion who was tossed out of his car and hospitalized in a coma. Charming little anecdote! It will encourage no end of tourism to the friendly lakes of central Ontario. Local fishermen, it appears, resent “strangers” fishing “their” waters for what may be a pollution-depleted fish stock. But who is the cause of most local fishery declines? Would it be strangers who have never lived in the area? Or is it local industry or local white-trash slob Canadians merrily tossing leaky drums of crankcase oil into formerly pristine waters? Or bozo white fishermen crapping over the gunnels of their boat whenever nature calls, voiding ill-chewed Quadruple Burgers into some protected, no-fishing area? I am reminded of an old Homer & Jethro parody whose lyric contained the line “We sailed with Captain Tuna, the chicken of the sea.” Nippertipping as a word is based on a racial slur against Japanese people that became prominent during the Second World War. A ‘nip’ was a Japanese citizen or soldier. It was a shortened form of Nippon, one of the Japanese words for Japan. Nip or nipper may also have been influenced by the earlier British slang nipper meaning a boy assistant who helped a carter or a drayman. That nipper was of mid-Victorian origin, first appearing in print in 1851. The secondary influence of the British word nipper may be a reflection of a common, World-War-Two belief that Japanese men were of smaller stature than European men."Little Nipper" was the famous white dog listening to a Victrola and His Master's Voice, a logo of complex use and a still-jealously-owned trademark. Little Nipper has been on a phonographic device of some sort continuously from 1884. Nip now appears to refer to any person of Asian extraction. One of the first racist jokes I recall hearing as a small child in postwar Ontario, circa 1949, is this one: Q: How could you tell they had hanged the Japanese spy? A: There was a little nip in the air this morning.
Etymology of Nip Nippon is actually the origin of our word Japan. にっぽん Nippon can also be written using Chinese characers: 日本 As The Oxford English Dictionary points out in a draft revision note from December, 2003, Nippon is short for the early Japanese name Nippon-koku ‘land of sun origin.’ Nippon consists of nip (a combining form of Japanese nichi ‘sun’ + pon (combining form of hon ‘beginning’ + koku ‘country.’ All these particular Japanese wordroots stem from Middle Chinese. How Did Nippon Become Japan? Portuguese and Dutch merchants trading at Malacca heard the Malay versions of the name Nippon. In the Malay language, Japan is Japung or Japang, possibly filtered through a Chinese form Jih-pun ‘sun rise.’ Adventurer and trader Marco Polo first brought back to Europe the earliest version of Japan’s name and he called it Chipangu. Oriental/Occidental Interestingly, oriental, our Latinate noun and adjective in English, also Orientalis bore a semantic hue of easterliness because, of course, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West or Occident. The Occident as a synonym for the West is an adjective and noun ultimately from another Latin verb, occidere ‘to fall down,’ ‘to go down,’ ‘(of the sun) to set.’
Bumsicle Here is another tidbit of brutal jargon from the taser-wielding classes of Canadian society. Bumsicle is Canadian police slang for an old alcoholic frozen to death on a winter night. This dismissive and hate-filled insult describes a rubbie whose stiff corpse has been found by night patrol on a city park bench. The word appears to have been formed on the analogy of Popsicle.
By the way, the word rubbie is a Canadian coinage too, to label alcoholics who consume rubbing alcohol, an even more potent poison than ordinary booze and one that transforms your liver into old-shoe leather reasonably quickly.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
I invite you to tour my site and select from the hundreds of word stories here. To begin, click on the Word List banner below. Then perhaps browse the site map with its links to every page of my
If you want to share some wonderful Canadian sayings with your family and friends , you will find more than 3,000 Canadian expressions in my books. Each of my three volumes of Canadian Sayings contains about 1,200 zesty phrases used by Canadians both today and throughout our history. Remember that profits from the sale of my books keep this website online for next year.
Order online from Chapters/Indigo
If you can't find my books online or in stores, order them directly from the author. Just send me an email canadiansayings@mountaincable.net
........................................ 2007 Recommendation “Bill Casselman…fascinating website on books and words” Brian Sibley, BBC broadcaster, author of the bestseller Shadowlands, about C.S. Lewis’ love affair with Joy D. .........................................
|
refers to the lands of the rising sun. The classical Latin adjective orientalis ‘eastern’ has its root in an earlier adjectival form oriens, orientis ‘rising,’ the present participle of the Latin verb oriri ‘to come out, to rise.’ Oriri has cognates throughout the Indo-European language family including Old English risan ‘to rise,’ Latin rivus ‘brook,’ ‘stream,’ Attic Greek ornynai ‘to urge on,’ ‘to cause to rise,’ Attic Greek oros ‘mountain,’ and Sanskrit words like arna ‘ wave’ and raya ‘stream.’
