Posted by alan truelove on March 07, 2005 at 14:49:55 from 66.239.159.18 user atruelove.
In Reply to: Re: Talkee English bimeby posted by Mike Field on March 07, 2005 at 01:31:46:
Bimeby also used in other schoolboy stories of the 30's-40's. (Eg in my bro's school prize book I have from that era). Clearly it is meant to be "by and by" said fast. One may assume the natives heard common phrases like this from their masters and reproduced them phonetically. Whether all this was genuine pidgin or (some) authors simply copied from each other I dont know. I expect all this kind of fiction stopped as multiculti and PC grew. It is preserved in mouldering schoolboy books and stacks of comics (DC Thompson) - Hotspur, Rover, Champion, Skipper etc -from that period, which usually contained at least one serial of the WhiteMan's burden variety. As far as I know Frank Richards-Bunter/Greyfriars- never got into this, but his cod rich Indian dialog is still lovingly preserved in the Truelove family and lexicon (as maintained by a recent daughter-in-law) e.g. "The frightfulness would be fearful.." . Off topic, we seem to returning to this in recent
teen movies ("National Lampoon's Van Wilder, Addams Family Values, and others) as Indians are the sole remaining ethnicity one can poke fun at.