Word: pidgin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...generations, Hawaii's teachers have struggled to make their students learn English, and haven't succeeded yet. Most of Hawaii's polyglot population-Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Puerto Ricans-prefer pidgin English, the nearest thing to a common language in the Islands...
...easygoing pidgin, one word does the work of 20, a shrug or grimace the work of ten. It ranges from the simple ("I no like that") to the colorfully complex ("You stay go, I stay come," meaning "You go ahead, I'll join you later"). When Hawaiian idiom is mixed with pidgin grammar, the result takes an expert to fathom. Sample: "He no got wahine. She too much pilikia. Make him huhu." ("He has no girl any more. She was too much trouble. She made...
Last week, after a six months' survey of Hawaii's language problem, a visitor from the mainland, Wabash College's Professor W. Norwood Brigance, warned the territory of the penalties of pidgin. Said he: "If the standard speech [continues to be] pidgin English, Hawaii will never fully become a cultural part of the U.S. Politically it may become the 49th state, but its people . . . will be held in contempt...
...flag," the British warships Amphion and Contest steamed into the harbor of Santa Ana Island in the southern Solomons (which are under a British protectorate). On the beach the Britons saw a strange flag flying from a pole-a yellow field with vertical black stripes. The Amphion's pidgin-English interpreter asked the truculent islanders grouped around the flagpole what the flag stood for. It stood, said the natives, for "Martin Lo"-pidgin English for Marxian law. Communism had arrived among the atolls...
Troubleshooter. Capa was always getting in & out of such scrapes, partly because his job was to find trouble, and partly because his pidgin-toed English was not always a help. But he came back with pictures that are an eloquent one-man record of World War II. Last week, in Slightly Out of Focus (Henry Holt, 243 pp., $3.50), he assembled an album of the best of them. It opens with a shot of the convoy that he rode to Britain in 1942, and closes with the young machine-gunner he snapped on an open balcony in Leipzig, seconds before...