Word: pidgin
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...evidently tramped the great lava beds of Soviet journalism, literature, ukases, encyclopedias, decrees and polemics, and toiled in the lead mines of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin classics. The result is not a formal study, but a beginner's handbook of what might be called progressive pidgin, published in England under the honest title of Doubletalk...
Along the way, Author Michener dishes up a short-order Cook's tour of Japanese art, food, culture, idiom. His habit of breaking into pidgin English brings even his love scenes ("Oh, Rroyd, I rub you berry sweet") close to low comedy. For the rest, Michener is so busy swatting interracial injustice that he beats the life out of his story long before it is time to say sayonara, Japanese for goodbye...
Half a century had passed since the white men first sounded the warning. "This Pidgin nonsense," cried the globetrotting Baron von Hesse-Wartegg,-should be replaced "by a sensible German language." But in spite of the baron-and all the efforts of imperial German officials -the natives of the New Guinea protectorate went right on speaking Pidgin, the language built up from years of dealing with white traders. By World War II, G.I.s were being taught to say: "Cut-im grass belong head belong me" ("I want a haircut"), and the 23rd Psalm was still going native in a wide...
Last week the old battle was raging again. The U.N.'s Trusteeship Council noted that Pidgin "has characteristics . . . which reflect now outmoded concepts of the relationship between indigenous inhabitants and immigrant groups" (U.N. Pidgin for "It's undemocratic"). The council's recommendation: that New Guinea's Australian administrators "develop plans to eliminate [Pidgin] completely." Would the resolution do the trick? Cried Paul Hasluck, Australia's Minister for Territories: "Just as foolish as suggesting that all Europeans should speak nothing but Russian next week...
Added the Sydney Morning Herald: "If 50 years ago the Germans found it impossible to defeat the spread of Pidgin . . . the problem now facing Australia is insuperable. The simple fact, of course, is that . . . Pidgin English has become a language in its own right, and no matter how many pious sentiments are expressed in the U.N. or elsewhere, its use and continued spread cannot be curbed." In other words, no matter how much busybody ol man bilog pies longwey (foreigners) fuss and fume, ol man bilong Nugini will go right on making toktok as they please...