Chop Chop Wiki Wiki

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is David calling from San Diego. How are you today?

Hi, David. Welcome to the show.

Hey, David. What are you thinking about in terms of language?

I have a saying that I’ve been saying since seventh grade when I was in Mr. Plum’s class in junior high.

And that saying is chop, chop, wiki, wiki.

And I’ve never heard it from anybody except for him, but it’s made its way into my vocabulary.

And now that I’ve got kids of my own, I’m coaching kids in soccer, and I want them to hurry up.

I say, chop, chop, wiki, wiki.

And one of the kids asked me the other day, coach, what does that mean?

I thought about it.

I’m like, you know, it means hurry up, but I don’t know where it comes from.

So let me go ask the experts.

And here we are.

What did they say?

Yeah, that’s an interesting combination, chop, chop, wiki, wiki.

Because are you familiar with chop-chop at all for hurry up?

Yeah, I’ve heard people say chop-chop, and I kind of assumed it was just you want to make dinner chop-chop in your chop-chopping dinner.

On the cutting board, huh?

No, chop-chop has been around in the language for a couple hundred years, borrowed from Chinese, from Cantonese, where a similar-sounding word means quick or fast.

And, in fact, the same root is in our word chopsticks.

I guess the idea is that you’re using them quickly or nimbly, right?

Chopsticks.

And what is that Chinese word?

It sounds like chop-chop.

There’s one, it depends.

It’s hard to Romanize these, but K-U-A-I is a rough approximation of the word.

So it looks like kawaii.

It happens twice.

It’s a reduplication, which means more of the same.

So it’s kind of like kawaii, kawaii, chop-chop.

But obviously there’s some dialect for things happening there, and I don’t pronounce Chinese at all.

Right, so we don’t know.

Kind of like double happiness.

You do it twice to emphasize it.

Sure.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So it was borrowed by the British during their time in Asia and brought into British English.

And then came into American English, and we’ve kept it ever since.

And the wiki wiki is interesting, too.

That’s a Hawaiian word that means quick.

Same thing, though.

The wiki alone means quick or haste, and then you double it to mean more of the same.

In fact, there’s a bus that leaves the airport in, I think it’s Honolulu.

That’s the wiki wiki bus.

And we have records of that being part of the Hawaiian language for almost just as long, a couple hundred years.

You can find it in really old dictionaries of missionaries who’ve gone to Hawaii.

So I’m wondering what Mr. Plum, what his background was.

Yeah, was he in the military or anything like that?

He was a history teacher.

Oh, so maybe just in his reading or just being like a learned man, right?

But why would they go together?

Well, that’s why I was asking about the military because both of these terms appear again and again in military slang dictionaries.

It is the kind of thing that you might have picked up as part of the lingo of being a soldier if you served, for example, in Hawaii at the base there or if you served overseas in countries where they speak Chinese.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if he, for example, was in the Korean War or if he was in World War II and he just picked it up as a soldier.

And now you’re passing it along to your soccer players.

And do you have any other notations of where they’ve been used together?

Well, no, but the wiki is the same wiki as in Wikipedia.

Right.

Oh.

Yeah.

I guess just thinking about it, 30 years ago, there was no Wikipedia.

That’s right.

Yeah, originally it was called the WikiWikiWeb and then later altered to Wikipedia.

Because you could change it quickly.

Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah, right?

Wonderful.

Well, thank you, guys.

That’s really fascinating.

Glad to help.

David, thank you so much for your call.

Thank you.

Have a great day.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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