Quick! What Are The Origins Of 'Chop-Chop'?

[Luke Skywalker]

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hide captionA photograph of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, China, taken around 1870-1880.

UIG via Getty Images
A photograph of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, China, taken around 1870-1880.
UIG via Getty Images

It takes a special kind of actor to mix bombast and fatuousness to comic effect — think Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock or Will Ferrell in Anchorman. But the all-time King of Pomposity was the late Ted Knight. He played the role of newscaster Ted Baxter in the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Judge Elihu Smails in Caddyshack.
Aside from being a status-crazed schmuck, the Smails character is a racist who calls locker room attendant Smoke Porterhouse a "colored boy." In a sublime act of retaliation, Porterhouse tries to destroy a pair of shoes belonging to Smails who is president of the country club. The judge, not knowing how the shoes got to be in their deplorable condition, huffily demands Porterhouse repair the damage:

"Oh, Porterhouse! Look at the wax build-up on these shoes. I want that wax stripped off there, then I want them creamed and buffed with a fine chamois, and I want them now. Chop-chop."

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I cannot think of a more condescending way to tell someone to hurry up than by telling them to "chop-chop"; especially, if the phrase is accompanied by clapping or snapping fingers.
Several etymological dictionaries trace the origins of the word to a version of pidgin English used on ships (and later by Chinese servants and traders who regularly interacted with foreigners. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first usage of "chop chop" in print to an 1834 article in the Canton (Ohio) Register. Two years later, it would also appear in The Penny Magazine, which was an illustrated English publication geared towards the working class. In an 1838 article, "Chinese English," the magazine defined "chop-chop" as "the sooner the better," but made no mention of the phase being rude or curt.

According to Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India, the noted Anglo-Indian dictionary published in 1886, the phrase originates from the Cantonese word "kap"