Telephone | Weeknotes #440

Heatwave comes;thoughts turn to rumour.Scandals and spies;culture at the window.No checks,only feelings.A countryin decline. Telephone Start Select Reset 📑 Photo 365 Terminal Access Dipping the Stacks Reading Music Remember Kids: Newsletter 📨TelephoneI found out this week that the information passing parlour game “Chinese Whispers” as it was called when I was growing up (“Telephone” in the USA) isn’t some super old English name for it. It’s a relatively recent term first used in print in 1964! Drawing on racist stereotypes about how Chinese people must all be communists and whispering secrets and speaking in a way that was deliberately confusing to Westerners.Before that, Victorians called it “Russian Scandal” (1861) and “Russian Gossip” (1880s). An even older 16th-century Italian precursor was the “game of the ear.” Ironically, in China, the game is just called chuánhuà (传话) “passing words.”Whilst game of the ear is the oldest written name/evidence we have for the existence of the…