"Chinese ace", an inept pilot, derived from the term "one wing low" (which supposedly sounds like a Chinese name), an aeronautical maneuver.This game is also known as "telephone" in North America and "wire-less telephone" in Brazil. " Chinese whispers", a children's game in which a straightforward statement is shared through a sequence of players, one player at a time, until it reaches the end, often having been comically transformed along the way into a completely different statement."Chinese puzzle", a puzzle with a nonexistent or a hard-to-fathom solution.In his 1989 Dictionary of Invective, British editor Hugh Rawson lists 16 phrases that use the word "Chinese" to denote "incompetence, fraud and disorganization". Historians trace Westerners' use of the word Chinese to denote "confusion" and "incomprehensibility" to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 1600s, and attribute it to Europeans' inability to understand China's radically different culture and world view. It was also commonly used by Americans during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Īdditionally, the term is documented to have been used in the US Marine Corps during World War II, where it was often expressed in the phrase "as screwed up as a Chinese fire drill". The bucket brigade began to draw the water from the starboard side, run directly over to the port side and then throw the water overboard, bypassing the engine room completely. The drill had previously gone according to plan, until the orders became confused in interpretation. To prevent flooding, a separate crew was ordered to ferry the accumulated water from the engine room up to the main deck, and to heave the water over the port side. The bucket brigade were to draw water from the starboard side, pass it to the engine room, and pour it onto the simulated "fire". The term goes back to the early 1900s, and is alleged to have originated when a ship run by British officers and a Chinese crew practiced a fire drill for a fire in the engine room.
" Chinese fire drill" is a slang term for a situation that is chaotic or confusing, possibly due to poor or misunderstood instructions.
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