Friday, March 30, 2012

Racist Onomatopoeia

Every Friday Mrs. Poop takes Julian to "Storytime" at the local public library, it's basically 20 minutes of singing, a 10-minute story and 15 minutes of destructive free play. On the rare occasion that I am off on a Friday I have taken him. But I hate it for several reasons:
1) The old lady running it has disdain for children. She doesn't like when the children get up and walk around.
2) The songs they sing are ridiculous. "Hot Cross Buns," really? We really need to teach our kids 19th century British imperial songs? Better than slave songs, but still.
3) It's all women, mostly chatty women who want to be nice and friendly and talk to the new guy. But I hate socializing, especially with psycho-mommies.

Against my better judgment a couple Fridays ago while I called in Madness and Mrs. Poop took Chase to the circus, I decided to go to storytime. Mrs. Poop's friend was also going to the circus so I expected her husband to be there as well. Plus, he gets laid a lot so I thought I could score some brownie points with Mrs. Poop. But he faked an illness so I was the only father there.

I lip-synched my way through the songs until we got to "The Wheels on the Bus." First of all they add a verse about daddies saying "shh shh shh." Probably because the mommies never shut the fuck up. Then they sang about the money on the bus. And I swear they were saying "the money on the bus goes chink chink chink." I was shocked. I thought this was maybe a holdover from 200 years ago, like "Hot Cross Buns" and since everyone learned it that way, no one changed it.
I came home and googled it and it turns out there are two alternate versions, clink and ching. Maybe some mommies were singing "clink, clink, clink" and when combined with the other mommies singing "ching, ching, ching" it sounded to me like "chink, chink, chink."

I'm just glad Jeremy Lin wasn't there.

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