[
    {
        "id": 214187,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 45,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "at the next station it wasn't Blanktown so Tsim turned to the Englishman again: 'I thought you said this train went to Blanktown?' John Bloggs replied: 'Look, don't look at me. I'm as surprised as you are!' \n\n'How can you expect foreigners to understand that sort of language,' asked Tsim laughing. \n\nCertainly English wit, delivered in a droll tone portraying a personal character, is firmly established in the British Isles. It is ingrained just as is English 'good sportsmanship.' Nevertheless it is not always easy for foreigners, even if they do speak good English, to understand. In fact the joke regarding junk bonds, with Monica Lewinsky bonds lacking maturity, Al Gore bonds lacking interest and Bill Clinton bonds lacking principle (al), is untranslatable because the necessary characters in Chinese do not have double meanings. \n\nEnglish wit can be clever and amusing. It includes gags about British Rail, watching soccer, the inclusion of the word 'knickers,' deadpan humour (recounted with mock solemnity and an emotionless face and manners), one-liner in-jokes, and witticisms with Brits poking fun at themselves and taking a deprecating view of their own society (Tse, 1997). The surname 'Carruthers' is sometimes used when telling jokes which, on its own, is usually sufficient to raise a smile. A joke, when told by an Englishman, is often preceded by the expression: 'Stop me if you have heard this one.' But the 'tribal custom' is never to stop the raconteur, \n\nMost Chinese dirty jokes are of the 'hard' variety but western smutty jokes also include those which women can listen to as well. For example English humour consists of vulgar postcards with off-colour jokes, which one still finds at the seaside (Orwell, 1945). There is the fat lady with the big bottom and many other cards some of which may border on the unprintable. British humour also consists of burlesque and caricature, where the character of a person is satirised and exaggerated. In turn, fantasy in humour can be imaginative and unrestrictive and farce highlights the ludicrous situation. \n\nThe Hong Kong necktie, designed in 1967 by Eric Cumine, a Eurasian architect with Scottish blood on his father's side, illustrates the \n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214210,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 68,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "31\n\none foot in the grave.' Such expressions could help to bring about death. Nevertheless, in Cantonese slang, a corpse is sometimes described as 'salt fish' (hàm yú), one imagines because of the smell. In the context of not joking about death Mary Rafferty, the then new chief executive at the Matilda Hospital, on the Peak in Hong Kong, seems to have put her foot in it when she told one of the Chinese doctors: 'I'm checking up on you to see if your patients are still alive' (Cheng, 1998). It did not seem to dawn on the good lady that you do not make such remarks in Chinese society.\n\nA retired English, Hong Kong government servant was, as his son described it, showing off to a lady friend how he could swim under water. He suffered a heart attack and died. 'What a wonderful way to go,' was how his middle-aged son, with a grin, described it. When the author related this event to a number of Chinese they were unable to appreciate the 'joke' in quite the same light.\n\nThe English sometimes play with sentences and the meaning of words, as may be seen from the joke quoted earlier in this paper, about Lewinsky, Gore and Clinton junk bonds. Similarly the Cantonese, with the homophonous nature of their language, play with similar tones with which two or more characters are pronounced (Smith, 1988:149). They love puns and double entendre, which Westerners do not always appreciate, in which their rich and complex language abounds (Bolton 1997:299). Chinese have a great deal of fun playing with homonyms in their conversations around dining tables. For example two pairs of Chinese characters, both pronounced faat choi but with slightly different tones, mean either 'hair vegetable' (fà cài) (a blue-green algae) or, alternatively, 'become wealthy' (fā cái). There are countless examples. Similarly, a lecturer who taught in the ‘electrical' engineering department of a college varied the tone of the word 'deen' (meaning electrical) so that it sounded as if he taught in the 'crazy' engineering department.\n\n... \n\nThe word for 'fry', in Cantonese, is pronounced chaau. But the same sound is also slang for 'speculate.' People joke about a certain Mr Wong, in Hong Kong, who changed his profession from cook to stockbroker. The pun is that he used to chaau food but now he chaaus shares!",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    }
]