foreign devil
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Calque of Cantonese 番鬼 (faan1 gwai2, literally “foreign devil”)
Noun
[edit]foreign devil (plural foreign devils)
- (China, archaic, derogatory) A foreigner.
- 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:
- "Alas! I called him 'foreign devil' then. Chang, too, had much to learn." "He is speaking of Lord Macartney."
- 1982 December 18, Siong-huat Chua, Sam Sasha, Philip Fung, “Hong Kong And The Emergence Of An Asian Gay Consciousness”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 22, page 8:
- Some liberals interested in reforming the law put out a questionnaire to poll public opinion on homosexuality. They got about two thousand people to answer the questionnaire but there were in the end only about five hundred responses. As usual most of these respondants were English, Europeans or Americans which gave a very skewed idea to the Chinese community who again viewed that only the "foreign devils" were interested in homosexuality and law reform.