Wednesday, February 16, 2011

British football pundit accused of 'casual racism' after making joke about Chinese names

A fuss over trivia. He wasn't insulting anyone.
"Commenting on a bungled move for the ball by Chelsea player Fernando Torres, he said: ‘It’s come off his chest, his knee, and his toe. It’s almost like that Chinese player Knee Shin Toe’.

Hoddle - who enjoyed a glittering career playing for Tottenham, Monaco and England - was sacked as the national team manager in 1999 when he claimed in an interview that disabled people were paying for their sins in a previous life.

Source

Names in Chinese often sound amusing in English. There was a big Chinese grocer in Sydney's Chinatown years ago called "Say Tin Fong". I must confess that my friends and I usually DID say "Tin Fong" as we walked past -- rather loudly sometimes. And there was a Chinese grocer over the road from my High School called "Wing On". I am sorry to say that he was sometimes told to "wing off" by some of my fellow students.

Even my mother used to tell me jokes about pseudo-Chinese names. One was: "Have you heard about the latest novel set in China -- called "Spot on the Wall" by Hoo Flung Dung?". And my mother was good friends with our local Chinese grocer so there was no animus in it.

Such jokes are just a harmless tradition in my view. But we live in more sensitive times now.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

My Polish stepfather used to tell the funniest polish jokes.

Doug said...

"sacked as the national team manager in 1999 when he claimed in an interview that disabled people were paying for their sins in a previous life."

Aren't there some religions that believe in reincarnation and your lot in this life is determinied by what you did in your previous lives?

Anonymous said...

"Political correctness is a greater threat to our freedom and liberty than is terrorism..."

Anonymous said...

"Political correctness is a greater threat to our freedom, security, and liberty than is terrorism..."

Sticks and stones (and suicide bombers) will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Which is the greater threat? You will sing a different tune when a terrorist blows your f***ing legs off.

Anonymous said...

My guess what is meant the 3:08 comment is that we enable the terrorists by not being able to call them out until it is too late. Fort Hood is an example of this - people were afraid to call out the murderer because they may be accused of reacism, islamaphobe etc.

Anonymous said...

yes. i actually think that these jokes can help to keep us free

Anonymous said...

new book:
"How to Steal" by Miss Lee Ding