What Is The Origin Of (182)?…
It’s not my pigeon
You can imagine the scene. You have a bone to pick with someone about something or the other. You give a detailed explanation of your complaint only to be met with a shrug of the shoulders and the comment, “sorry mate, it’s not my pigeon.” What they mean by this is that it is not their responsibility or has nothing to do with them; it is not their business.
Frustrating as this sort of encounter can be, it raises the question; Why a pigeon?
By repute, when a Brit meets a Johnny Foreigner and they can’t get them to understand what they want, the solution is to bellow the same sentence as loudly as they can. Of course, it is their inability to comprehend rather than any hearing deficit that is at the root of the problem. Communication is a tricky thing and the wonder is that when representatives from two nations met for the first time how they managed to make their views known to each other. Gesticulation and grimacing can only take you so far, although someone approaching you with a sword, gun or spear has made their general intentions fairly clear.
When the riches of the Chinese mainland were being unlocked – opium for fine silks and porcelain seemed a fair exchange – there was a need for both parties to converse with each other. Initially, the communication process was fairly rudimentary but a variant of English developed which became known as Pidgin, a word derived apparently from the Chinese’s vain attempt to get their teeth and tongue around the word business.
The first use of it in print dates to 1831. The use of pidgin to describe business is illustrated in this extract from William Tarrant’s Hongkong from 1862; “it only stopped the private Pidgin for a time; the wicked and corrupt government of a later day permitting the old thing over and over again.”
Pidgin began to be used figuratively to suggest concern or business in a more general sense. The North-China Herald of 1st August 1890 reported that “we agreed that if anything went wrong with the pony after, it was not to be my pidgin.” In Australia the Bulletin on 27th December 1902 noted “guarding a house is not their pidgin as the Chinese say” while in 1904 Rudyard Kipling wrote in a collection of short stories called Traffics and Discoveries, “what about the musketry average? I went on. Not my pidgin, said Bayley.”
We are asked to believe that over time the origin of the word pidgin was forgotten and replaced by the more familiar pigeon. But this seems to be a gross oversimplification, not least because the earliest use of a gloss for business in the Orient appears in an unpublished Journal by the missionary Robert Morrison as pigeon. “This Jos, pointing to the idol, said he take care of fire pigeon.” In 1834 he helpfully compiled a glossary of Chinese Pidgin English, defining “pigeon or pidginess as a corruption of the English word business.” In other words, the use of pigeon for business predates the 1831 usage.
Pigeon English appeared before pidgin English. One of the first usages dates to 1859, relating to a visit to Macao in 1857; “A-tye will row you out as she can speak pigeon English.” It was not until 1867 in the snappily entitled The Treaty Ports of China and Japan. A Complete Guide to the open ports of those countries, compiled by Messrs Dennys, Mayers and King that we encounter pidgin English, defined as “a queer compound of Anglicised Chinese and Chinese-rendered English, with a few words of Malay and Portuguese.”
What are we to make of all this?
The inevitable conclusion is that pidgin and pigeon were used contemporaneously with pigeon, perhaps, the word of choice amongst Anglophones. If anyone disagrees, it is not my pigeon.
