RE: “Mighty White of You”
I always thought it was “mighty wide of you,” as in “mighty large of you.”
Perhaps I’ve just been hearing what I want to hear.
Welch and welsh are both derogatory, and refer to the presumed behaviour of people from Wales. Welch is an obsolete spelling, still used in the title of the Royal Welch Fusiliers regiment but not often elsewhere.
Porch monkey (and it’s variation yard ape) and pickaninny are all derogatory terms for black (or African-American) children. These terms are racist and are considered highly offensive in the South.
a slight modification of # 1 appears as a lyric on the song “Wordz of Wizdom” by 3rd Bass:
Heart as, hard as, Chinese arithmetic
Avante garder, not a heretic
Figure out a right rhyme, stick it in my cranium
Pete Nice, elemental like uranium
AFAIK, it needn’t be always “algebra”, as heard other variations over the years. I agree with Sublight that many of you may simply be over- thinking the meaning behind the phrase. Personally, I doubt that it actually refers to the fact that letters stand for numbers in algebra- it just sounds harder.
Having lived my whole life in the Pacific Northwest, and having never heard either of those terms until this thread, I hope nobody would consider me racist for coining the term “booth apes” to refer to those people whose entire lives seem to revolve around sitting in a restaurant booth drinking coffee and bullshitting (mainly retired men and younger government employees).
Man, I always thought I coined the term “porch monkeys” from my obsession with monkeys in general. I probably just heard it somewhere without knowing the context or the implied insult and thought it was funny. I mean, c’mon, it’s monkeys! Monkeys are always funny! I guess when I visit my parents in the south, though, I’ll have to be more careful with that word.
I first heard the phrase in Tom Waits’ Pasties and a G-String, from the album Small Change (1976):
But Waits here is using “harder” to mean more than just intellectual difficulty.
Personally, I would bet that the original form is “Chinese algebra,” based on the idea of using letters in formulas, and the other forms (mathematics, arithmetic) are corruptions or misrememberings of this.
Where the heck is samclem?
I was under the impression that “Chinese fire drill” was meant as an insult because in the activity everyone gets out of the car and runs around (as I’m sure anyone would were their car on fire) and then get back inside.
Saying “call a spade a bloody shovel” seems to spoil the whole meaning of the phrase.
[sup]A rose by any other name is still a flower.[/sup]]
Wow…that’s the first post-PC interpretation I’ve seen in the SDMB. ‘Welch’ means ‘to evade’, ‘Welsh’ means ‘Welsh’. Both have endless historical contexts which we’d all do well to ignore. And they have shared etymologies. But so what? Does anyone ever really confuse them?
Taking every historical precedent possible, and finding every derogatory usage of every word, would make the English language unusable.
.why, this guy was so fat he had more chins than a Chinese phonebook…
…sorry…ducks and runs… 
‘As complicated as Chinese arithmetic’ was something that I always attributed to the use of an abacus.
the first time i heard the term “yard monkey” (and i haven’t heard it or the variants very often) the speaker was referring to people who were loud, drunk and obnoxious at an outdoor concert. in context it referred to people who didn’t know how to behave in a public place. the speaker and everybody he was talking about were white. no racial implications were intended.
Besides the dictionaries? I mentioned this before. Here’s dictionary.com, which quotes the Ame.Her.Dic., Webster’s, and Wordnet. Welch is just listed as a variant on welsh.
That’s silly. oops
Looks like it’s considered interchangeable in American English - and I’m astonished that they provide both pronunciations for both spellings.
Why?
To advance on that…the Cambridge Dictionary gives “welch…(ALSO welsh) INFORMAL DISAPPROVING”, and “welsh (AVOID)…to welch”. Clearly they’re making the distinction between the two spellings to avoid the confusion.
And yes, I know that ‘welch’ is also a historical variant spelling of ‘welsh’, but that’s separate.
Perhaps. I don’t have a Cambridge dictionary handy. What do they say about the definitions of scotch and irish, as in the senses “to quell”, “to injure”, “to cut or score” (for scotch), and “fieriness of temper” (for irish)?
SCOTCH:
- (of products) of or from Scotland;
- a type of whisky … made in Scotland;
- to prevent something from being believed or being done (slightly formal);
Also listed: Scotch broth, Scotch egg, Scotch broth, Scotch mist, Scotch Tape, Scotch terrier.
I’ve never heard of it meaning cut or score - maybe another American usage?
A similar set of results for Irish (-American, Coffee etc.)
Thanks for the link, but those are Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary entries, right?
I find it odd and amusing that teh stern warning appears in the entry for Gypsy but not for the (presumably) far more offensive gypsy cab!
BTW, I too thought that “Chinese fire drill” was an insult. When I was in kindergarten, it seems that Chinese was a sort of slang for doing something backwards or otherwise wrongly. In a real fire drill you run outside. In a Chinese fire drill, you just run in circles and go back in. Unfortunately, like “Jew’s harp” there just isn’t another good word to describe the thing. (I said good word. Certainly, there are other words for a Jew’s harp (though not a Chinese fire drill), but they are all weak substitutions to avoid the older and more offensive term.)