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POLISH PRIME

Posted By: Daniel Murphy
Date: Sunday, 14 November 2010, at 1:17 a.m.

In Response To: POLISH PRIME (Casper van der Tak)

I suppose there are many reasons, not all of them defensible, why "expressions coined for historical reasons" have hitched various national adjectives to various nouns. My goodness, the things one learns on the internet. I had no idea that we have the Dutch to thank for gin ("courage"), or Thomas Hutchinson for "Indian giver," and "Polish prime," I see, is defined in the Backgammon Galore glossary, and surely no offense is meant by it.

But when I was a kid growing up mostly in the USA, so-called Polish jokes were ubiquitous. I haven't heard one told to my face for a long time. Not that ethnic jokes have entirely disappeared, or are always unfunny, or always grounded in baseless stereotypes. But the striking thing about the Polish jokes was that there was almost never anything especially Polish about them, the adjective or some form of it usually being nothing more than an ethnically spiced synonym for "moron." Which is why, I imagine, Paul flagged this so-called "Polish prime" phrase as not wholly innoccuous.

Perhaps some unknown resident of Kraków should be credited for originating a "bold technique to repair the timing of a bad timed back game." But I suspect, rather, that the implication of the term is that breaking one made point and creating three new blots might just possibly not be the most intelligent way to make a prime.

It's only a matter of time before someone chimes in bemoaning so-called political correctness ... oops, too late! The first chimer would have us believe that "Polish" is merely "descriptive," and not at all "derogatory," an assertion rather undercut by the simultaneous mention of "Polish" and "blonde." Why not, say, Bulgarian and brunette? Perhaps because, in yuk-yuk land, two of the words, and not the others, have an implicit association of "dumb"?

But what do I know. I'm still working, speaking of things Dutch, on understanding what's particularly Dutch about "Three, one to replace the bulb and two to steady the bicycle."

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