My specific question is that I remember Bernard Lewis mentioning that a certain STD is/was called something like the “French disease” in either Arabic or Farsi. Is that true? What disease is it?
More generally though, what terms in one language make reference to a certain nationality? Some obvious examples in English are “French kiss”, “Chinese fire drill”, “Indian summer”, etc. etc. I’m particularly interested in terms from other languages, and any interesting stories that might come along.
French toast, English muffin, swiss cheese, german shepherd, irish creme, chinese checkers, canadian bacon, brazil nuts, nigerian scam
I seem to remember that the word for an orange in Dutch is a “Chinese Apple”.
‘Cor Anglais’, something fairly close to what we would call the French Horn.
Football hooliganism in the eighties was called ‘The English Disease’ in various European languages.
Brit examples: Dutch Courage, Going Dutch, Scotch Mist, German Measles, Spanish Flu, Portugese Man o’ War, Turning Japanese, Chinaman (a type of bowl in cricket), Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, Swedish Massage, Danish Pastry, Brazilian, Columbian Marching Powder, French Lessons (rather outdated), Shoe Polish;)
French kissing, French tickler, French fries, ‘Greek’ sex.
In French, crème anglaise is a type of custard. Then there’s hollandaise sauce.
French also gave us the allemande dance. The Germans, in turn, contributed the name of the Schottische (which has no relationship to Scotland), and of course there’s the Spanish flamenco, which has nothing to do with Flanders.
True, but they speak Double Dutch
In general, up until the mid-20th Century homosexuality was called the [nationality] vice, where the nationality was something other than your own.
In France, they sell “American sandwich” bread in markets.
Some Japanese examples: amerikan Dogu = corn dogs, echiopia manju = a Japanese sweet that was named in honour of the Ethiopians after they fought off the Italian invasion in the 30’s, baka chon kamera = an old, racist term that means a camera that is so easy to use that a Korean could figure it out (no longer in common use).
Spanish examples:
A roller coaster (the amusement park ride) is known as a “montaña rusa”, literally a “Russian mountain”.
The letter “Y” is called “i griega”, literally “Greek i”.
Somewhere, I remember reading that a turkey (the bird), in the Turkish language, is “hindi”.
Yeah, in French, Y is called “i grec.”
Also, Turkey’s a pretty interesting example. If I remember correctly the several different European languages call the Turkey by a different nationality.
A Chinese example would be “mongolian doctor,” which isn’t particularly flattering.
It’s pretty common around here in the construction trades to say, for example, a Tiajuana Tile job if a tile job is done poorly. Instead of saying “Mexican”, you pick up on an alliterative Mexican city as the adjective.
I recall in college reading a story in German in which one of the characters walks into a messy room and says (in German) “This room looks Polish.” The professor teaching the course said that this, although considered in poor taste, was a common slang expression in German.
Know what an “English key” is?
I’ve heard that every language has an expression analogous to “it’s Greek to me”, except with a different “foreign” language. IIRC, Greeks call an incomprehensible language “Turkish”, Turks call an incomprehensible language “Chinese”, and the Chinese, not having any more bewildering Earthly language to call it, say that it’s the language of Heaven.
The French disease is syphilis. THE big STD back in the day, it was always from elsewhere. You know, furriners and their filthy mores.
The Brits called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease, the Portuguese and Dutch called it the Spanish disease, to the Russians it was the Polish disease… The nationality of choice usually was a foreign place the nation’s soldiers spent time in - long campaigns meant more opportunities for soldiers to meet the local prostitutes and acquire invisible new friends.
A French letter is a condom. Then again, so is “une capote anglaise” (the English raincoat).
More French :
That’s all I can think of right now, I’m sure there’s more.
In French it’s called a dinde, which originally comes from coq d’Inde, in Catalan it’s gall dindi, and in Portuguese it’s a peru.
But in Spanish it’s called a pavo (originally meaning peacock), in Italian it’s tacchino, whose origin I don’t know, and in German it’s Truthuhn, apparently from “trut-trut” as an onomatopoeia for its call. (It did use to be called an indianisches Huhn, Kalikuter – which might have given rise to Dutch kalkoenen and similar in the Scandinavian languages, for all I know – or Kutschhahn.)
In Scots, wonderfully, it’s called a bubbly-jock.
It appears this is the etymology; the Dutch Wikipedia page relates kalkoen to Kalikut-hoen.
In Russian, it’s индейка (indeyka).
“Cor Anglais” is an English horn, not a French horn.