I remember proposing to use the phrase "chinaman's chance" in a headline. Of course, I knew it would never be permitted. I just wanted to shock my colleagues - and point out to them that, in the phrase "doesn't have a chinaman's chance," the term chinaman refers to the owner of china shop, not a person from China (a chinaman doesn't have a chance if a bull gets loose in his shop).
My understanding is that "chinaman's chance" refers to the dangerous jobs that Chinese laborers took in the western US in the 1800's, such as being suspended from baskets over cliffs to place explosives. (I don't want to sound like a know-it-all, I just happen to read a lot of western history.) In the above context it does have an ethnic derivation, though I would consider it a very positive one - these workers took risks knowingly in hopes of future betterment for themselves and their descendents.
ReplyDeleteA psychiatrist friend of mine and I looked it up years ago in, I believe, William and Mary Morris's Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, and that was the explanation. I will have to look it up - though there is plenty of support for the explanation you mention as well. The first definition of "chinaman" in my OED is "a dealer in porcelain." Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of the Morris book.
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