"'Gambai.
"Drummond thought Robinson must have flown the Hump in World War Two to learn that toast. That would have been long ago, when he was young and it was still possible to win a war."
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World (London, 1984), Prologue, I, p. 9.
Observations
I had to google the Hump.
World War II was "long ago" but still recent enough for a man who had served in it to serve also in World War III. That is no longer the case, if we are going to have a World War III: another example of a future becoming a past.
That is all for today, folks. I will be busy tomorrow but might manage to publish some posts.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Poul Anderson had the WW III of his Psychotechnic Institute stories starting sometime around 1960, some 15 years after WW II ended. A respectable but not excessive amount of time--meaning it would be possible for General Robinson to be still actively serving 15 years later if he was a young officer in 1945.
Sean
I have to question Drummond's reasoning about flying the Hump. I'm assuming "Gambai" is the same toast which my Japanese-English dictionary Romanizes as "kanpai," rather than a non-Japanese expression that happens to sound the same. But an American flying the Hump wouldn't have been likely to have the kind of interactions with Japanese that would lead to learning a Japanese toast. It would be more plausibly picked up while part of the U.S. occupation forces during the six years immediately following the war.
He's using an alternative Romanization of Gānbēi, which is a _Chinese_ toast meaning "Dry Cup" in Mandarin.
My father enlisted in 1939, at the age of 21, and retired from the Canadian Air Force in 1964, so if WWIII had happened in the interim -- which was the period of maximum probability for it -- he'd have been in that, too.
One of my first "public affairs" memories is of us packing our station-wagon with supplies ready to take to our fallout shelter in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- my father was on the roster for the national shelter of the Canadian government, which as he much later pointed out to me was considerably less safe than the family shelter at our place outside Ottawa where my mother and my brothers and I were going to go, since the Soviets certainly knew where it was and would bomb it.
Ah. I expect, then, that the Japanese borrowed it. They certainly borrowed so much else from China. Thank you for the information, Mr. Stirling.
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