“Stick it where the monkey stuck the nuts” is a common saying in Ireland (I think in England too). It’s normally used in a playful fashion, eg: ME: Where do you want this (this being some object whose location is not particularly important)? Repeat question until she answers MOM: Stick it where the monkey stuck the nuts!
However, my uncle, who lives in England said this at a shopping centre to his children who were asking him if they could have a particular chocolate bar.
Apparently a rather large and angry black woman looked shocked for a moment, and then preceded to berate him for using the phrase.
I always took the phrase to be a reference to chimpanzees, and othing to do with black people.
Terry Pratchett uses the phrase in one of his Discworls novels (Lords and Ladies, I believe).
It’s used in a gag with “put in where the sun don’t shine” (which turns out to be a small valley near Slice, although there aren’t any monkeys there). It’s later picked up as a running gag involving the Librarian.
So not racist, just a comment on a perceived tendency of chimps to shove random things up their bums.
You know what? This is fucking ridiculous. This whole insane, regressive mentality that ANYTHING RELATED TO MONKEYS IS OFFENSIVE TO BLACK PEOPLE. It’s absurd! On the one hand, they hold the position - rightly - that black people should not be compared to monkeys. Okay. Nobody should be compared to monkeys. A comparison to monkeys implies that someone is primitive and somehow less than human. So comparing people to monkeys is bad, and comparing black people to monkeys is quite racist. OKAY. But then…someone says something totally innocuous, having nothing to do with any kind of racist intention, and then all of a sudden everyone’s screaming “RACISM! RACISM!” In effect, they’re saying, "YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE WHEN YOU SAY “MONKEYS!” Even if they are not talking about black people.
What’s the end result of this?
It fucking ties the image of monkeys and the image of black people closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, and CLOSER. Every time people cry “racism!” at the mention of monkeys in a completely and obviously non-racist context, **THEY ARE PERPETUATING THE RACIST NOTION THAT BLACK PEOPLE ARE MONKEYS BY EVEN MAKING THE CONNECTION IN THE FIRST PLACE.
**
I’m sorry for the capital letters and all the other emphases…but this issue really, really burns my ass. It annoys me to no end. Monkeys are animals. People are people. It’s possible to talk about monkeys and not be making any racial references. Okay? OKAY? So enough already!
This is NOT directed at anyone here, it’s directed at all the people in the media, and in society at large, who insist on perpetuating this black-monkey connection even though it only hurts their cause.
A guy walks into a bar with a monkey. The monkey runs over to the pool table and swallows the cue ball. The man apologizes profusely, pays for the cue ball and leaves. A couple of weeks later, the man and his monkey returns to the same bar. The monkey is better behaved and sits at the bar with the man. There is complimentary nuts on the bar. The monkey grabs a nut, sticks it in his ass, pulls it out and eats it. The bartender wasn’t quite sure if he saw what he thought he did, but a couple of moments later, the monkey grabbed another nut, stuck it in his ass, pulled it out and ate it.
The bartender was disgusted, and asked the man what his monkey was doing. The man said, “ever since the cue ball incident, he checks everything for size first”.
I’m not sure how old that joke is, but could that be the source of the saying?
It would have to be.
Otherwise what the hell does it even mean?
“Stick it where the monkey stuck the nuts”???
Where would monkeys stick nuts other than in their mouths?
Are you sure the woman was offended because she thought it was racist and not because it sounded like a really crass thing to say to kids or something?
I have never heard the expression, but instantly recognized it as a “stick it where the sun don’t shine” equivalent. I have absolutely no idea why the woman thought it was racist.
I dunno, I guess I could see why someone might leap to that conclusion in those circumstances. I wouldn’t have understood the phrase without a full explanation, and it does sound like if not racist, it could be vulgar.
OP: Did the woman say he was being racist, or did she just yell at him for saying that - she might have thought he was making a reference to “stick it where the sun doesn’t shine”, which definitely would have angered me, perceiving it as being rude without provocation. (Maybe she thought he was being racist for being rude for no reason, not for saying something about a monkey?)
I don’t think the phrase is racist, so far as I know. I do have some reservations whether this incident reported to you in fact occurred, seeing as it reads like so many racist urban legends, complete with the figure of the “rather large and angry black woman” who cashiers an innocent for all the wrong reasons.
In other words, now that expressing racist beliefs directly carries considerable reputational costs, those beliefs are expressed indirectly, in these allegorical forms.
It reminds me of the debate over whether “the pot called the kettle black” is racist. I shit you not, one of my co-workers took me to task you’re-a-racist-oppressor-who-eats-ethnic-babies style over that phrase during a meeting where I was joking about a particular slumlord’s whining about something or the other. I was busy trying to pick my jaw off the desk and didn’t really have the focus to respond to that but fortunately my boss was there and was like “she was raised in Canada and speaks funny sometimes…next!”
Of note-I am not lacking in melanin myself. Which made the whole thing more surreal to me.
The uses aren’t random. They specifically coincide with moments of emphasis in the text. Most fiction that I read uses this technique, in the dialog of characters speaking to each other. (I mean, except for the color - but the use of color for emphasis is quite common in advertising.) There’s no objective reason why I shouldn’t use caps, italics, bolding, or colors for emphasis, if what I’m writing is well-organized, well-written, clear, direct and free of errors.
I’m more than willing to write in a detached, clinical tone for professional work. But on this board, I will write in a way which reflects my emotions. In a rant such as the one I put forth, there are emphases on words and sentences which would come across in a speech conversation but which would be lost in text form without the use of italics, bold, etc. That’s just how I want to do it - sorry if you dislike it.
