Glossary: Gweilo (m.), gweipo (f.)

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Cantonese. White devil. Pale ghost. White demon ghoul.

You get the gist.
It has lost some of its derisive sting due to its extremely popular, colloquial use in Hong Kong, by English and Cantonese speakers alike. Used in much the same fashion as gora.

Which is to say, descriptively, to distinguish.
Or, when dipped in chilli-garlic sauce, to ridicule. Consider:
Bloody gweilos! When will they learn how to eat rice with chopsticks.



Article: Creative Commons License 2008 Gavin Barrett

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License.


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Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Creative Director, of award-winning Toronto agency Barrett and Welsh.

1 comment :

  1. unsignedMay 12, 2008 at 6:51 AM

    Racial slurs against white people never work. The slurs all do one thing that white people love. They reinforce their identity as white people.

    White people don't seem to care what you call them as long as it reinforces the idea that they are not like everyone else.

    The best way to make a white person angry is to ignore them completely.

    ReplyDelete

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About the ideawallah

Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Chief Creative Officer, of award-winning Toronto agency Barrett and Welsh. In pursuit of big ideas he has: nibbled on pigs' ears (not on a live pig at the time); gone elephant-back in the Thai jungle (no elephants were hurt); gambled in a Macau casino (was utterly destroyed). His ads: have run in 35 countries, helped elect prime ministers, attracted the ire of the lawyers for Dolly the clone sheep, drawn an angry crowd in Lagos, have been studied in business texts in Canada and India and received derisive mention in a John Irving novel. His poems: can be found in Penguin’s anthology of 14 contemporary Indian poets, Reasons for Belonging. He cannot: sing.

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