I’m trying to make sense of this insult.
Wow! There’s a lot of flavours of crazy going on in that report:
Korea was sometimes called the Hermit Kingdom because it was relatively isolated from the Western world. (This nickname is still sometimes used for North Korea). So maybe calling a Korean person a hermit crab is a reference to this?
Or maybe it’s something a crazy person would say.
For what it’s worth, the woman she was calling a hermit crab is named Vu, which means her family probably came from Vietnam not Korea.
“I can name that tune in Three Racial Slurs, George!”
I’m guessing Jennifer doesn’t realize that “gypped” is an anti-Roma slur? (I’m still embarrassed by how long it took me to find that out).
Forget it, Jake. It’s Florida.
I am pretty sure a lot of people don’t know that. The Roma don’t have a large presence in Florida.
Hermit crabs make a creaky chirping sound. It’s rather high pitched. Perhaps she was saying that the manicurist’s voice combined with the phonemes of the language she was speaking sounded like chirpy gibberish to her.
But seriously, there are better ways to describe the cadence of a foreign language than likening it to a hermit crab. That person is a real piece.
Huh. I learned something today; thanks.
New to me, too, and I’ve owned hermit crabs.
My husband (back before we were married) had hermit crabs. One night, I fell asleep in the living room – where he kept the crabs – and when I woke, I heard this weird, high pitched noise. Kinda freaked me out in my half-awake state. Finally woke up enough to realize that it was his stinking hermit crabs. (And I mean stinking literally.)