the old wise tale
Old wives tale. There’s nothing wise about it…
Yes! Eggcorns is by far the superior term for “alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context.”
When I was growing up you’d hear stories about how the local Chinese immigrants would eat neighborhood cats when they caught them.
But our “Chinese” neighbours were actually Portuguese, and vegetarian.
Racists are going to be racist, regardless of reality
Chinese immigrants
I used to work at a Chinese restaurant an the number of people who came in there blithely asking me if we “really” cooked and served cats was astounding.
I got tired of answering the question so often that towards the end I gave up and my standard response was, “No, we only cook and serve idiots who go around saying we cook cats.”
I think the very low percentage of lost business was worth it. And this only because my boss told me that this kind of thing did not meet the criteria wherein I was allowed to roundhouse kick patrons in the teeth. If you’re going to be a dumbass, at least try to be original.
Because racism is learned. It’s the same tired tropes they heard from their parents. Today’s racists are racist against Central American and Caribbean immigrants. Twenty years ago it was the Middle East. In the 1970s it was southeast Asians. Before that were… everybody else. This is America. There’s always some new cultural group to demonize.
I remember a comedian who once described it like you did saying America is just one big game of tag your it.
Dehumanising people makes it easy to hate and persecute them, and to blame them for a bunch of stuff which isn’t their fault. It really is a classic move with a rich history.
I was discussing this with my mom over the phone and we kind of both were wondering if this is the playbook that Hitler used.
Absolutely. It’s the playbook all fascists use.
ELI5 How come it seems now the old wise tale of Vietnamese eating pets and now its immigrants into the USA?
I don’t understand that sentence.
ELI5 How come it seems now the old [wives’] tale of Vietnamese eating pets and now its immigrants into the USA?
That’s still a rather incomprehensible sentence.
This is funny as the Vietnamese joke about Chinese this way, they have a saying that translates as, ‘the only thing they don’t eat with 4 legs is a table’
