Dead Dog Chew

My parents speak a variant of Cantonese known as Taishan. Taishan is to Cantonese as Hillbilly is to English, missing teeth and all. I suppose each culture has its unique arsenal of cuss words and expressions, but I figure Taishan/Cantonese is right up there at the pinnacle.

In English, there's the litany of mother* insults, and expressions like "Your father has your cheap sister on his breath." and so on. But Taishan is different in that insults are part of the normal vernacular. (There's one very oft used expression that I simply cannot bring myself to post here. You hear the cooks in the back of every dumpy greasy spoon Chinese restaurant saying it.)

An example. A Japanese person in Taishan is a Japan boy. Boy because we want to draw attention to their shorter stature and because it indentures them. A first nations or Indian or Italian or practically any other ethnic group or person is always suffixed with ghoul or bastard, so it's "that Italian bastard" or "caucasian ghoul." Give that caucasian ghoul a beer, that'll keep him happy, was something I heard said all the time.

The older generation I've been around often refers to individuals as that "goddamn runaway slut" or that "damn smelly pig", so much so that I as a kid never knew these people's real names. I would say matter-of-factly to my relatives, "oh, I saw the goddamn smelly pig's daughter today" without meaning to make a derogatory statement.

Now that I'm older, I still make these same remarks, but I also laugh really hard ;-)

Back to the dog chew, the title of this post. The equivalent to goddamn/damn as used above, in Taishan, is dead. So a dead dog chew corresponds to damn/goddamn dog chew. My mother taught me this put down Saturday. She said it was a favourite snub of a close relative, for her own daughter.

During the Vietnam War and World War II, when the Japanese, er, make that Japan boys, raped China, a lot of unclaimed bodies were left to rot. A dead dog chew is thus the rotting human flesh scavenged by hungry dogs.

Come to think of it, I'm starting to think it's my damn mean [these are my words] relatives, and not the Taishan dialect, who are the authors of these kick in the teeths ... wait a minute, that'll explain all the missing teeth.