Talk:must have killed a Chinaman

Requests for deletion - kept
Kept. See archived discussion of January 2009. 22:36, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

plagiarism
The etymology given here is perhaps supposed to be a paraphrase of the info given in the entry in The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English p. 393. However, it is too close to the original source to be considered a paraphrase, and all the info in the etym is taken from that one source. That it is not attributed amounts to plagiarism.WikiLambo (talk) 01:10, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I have reworded the etymology. - -sche (discuss) 01:23, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It's still plagiarismWikiLambo (talk) 07:00, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Re-reworded. An inline reference might be appropriate. — Pingkudimmi 08:06, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Re-did the etymology again. The info about it being good luck to see a Chinese man before making a bet is not really relevant to the origin of this particular expression - also, it is not well attested as far as I can see. The source of this info is Joe Andersen "Winners can laugh" written in 1982, a long time remote from the earliest evidence of our expression (1897). There's plenty of early evidence for Australians "killing a Chinaman" (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=%22killed+a+chinaman%22) without any indication of luck good or bad resulting, merely judicial punishment of one sort or another. More than 38000 Chinese came to Australia during the gold rush from the 1860s onwards (Siegel 2009), mostly Cantonese. Early attestations of the phrase do not provide any explication of the superstition, and none of them seem to treat the superstition as a serious notion - merely whimsical, as the definition says.WikiLambo (talk) 01:23, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Etymology much better now. Well done allWikiLambo (talk) 08:43, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

All in all, there's no such slang, just made up by a bunch of idiots in a room, drafting plans, etc.

definition
The current "verb" definition is quite wrong. The expression is not substitutable for "to be suffering a run of bad luck". The previous non-gloss def was much better, it is used as an explanation for bad luck. Also, it does not have to be a "run" of bad luck, merely an instance of bad luck, though it can be used to explain a run of bad luck too.WikiLambo (talk) 08:42, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Offensiveness
This would certainly simply be offensive→risqué in British and North American English. If the phrase is still generally acceptable in Australian English (although dear G-d why?), that should be addressed by qualifying the definition's tag to something like rather than in the usage note that was previously here. — LlywelynII  08:42, 15 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Fixed. No we never say this. 149.167.173.216 14:51, 2 July 2023 (UTC)


 * You tagged it "obsolete", which the recent quotes clearly contradict. I made it "dated" for now, it could maximally be "archaic". Regarding the offensiveness my guess would be that it may offend people, but is not normally used in order to offend. I find "possibly offensive" the best wording to use in this (very common) situation. But I don't know anything about this particular phrase, so I left it. 178.4.151.204 18:10, 14 October 2023 (UTC)