white monkey
- noun
- Slur
:
[insulto despectivo contra asiáticos percibidos como occidentalizados]
- He was labelled a white monkey after moving abroad and changing his style completely.
Examples
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They called him a white monkey for dressing in Western clothes.
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The gossip column referred to his public outburst as a typical white monkey moment.
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Some classmates called her a white monkey just because she liked strange hobbies.
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Some people view her as a white monkey because of her accent.
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He was labelled a white monkey after moving abroad and adopting Western customs.
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They mocked him as a white monkey for his eccentric behavior at the party.
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Some classmates referred to her as a white monkey because she embraced Western fashion.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The derogatory/slang sense of 'white monkey' (someone perceived as adopting Western customs or being oddly eccentric) is not predictably derived from the literal meanings of 'white' (light-skinned/European) and 'monkey' (animal/playful person). This is a culturally specific, pejorative usage with pragmatic nuance, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words would not reliably infer the idiomatic meaning.
Etymology
White monkey may come from the image of a monkey dressed in Western clothes and made to act like a white person, a small show that looked strange or funny to local people. So calling someone a white monkey became a rude way to say they were 'acting like a foreigner' or behaving 'odd'.
