Another Interesting Army Story
During 'live-firing' range training in the Army in National Service (another national institution, hey, why not ban this too?), soldiers who are really, really bad shots are called 'Bobo shooters', by their instructors and comrades.
Now, I used to think that the word 'Bobo' came from the Hokkien rude root word, 'Boh', meaning 'don't have', 'don't got', or 'nothing', but an old Army hand recently left a comment in my Army team blog and explained otherwise:
BOBO is an adulterated version of WOWO. WO stands for 'Washed Out', i.e., hopeless in shooting (like our national soccer team), can't get a single hit.
During those days, there were the english educated and the chinese educated. There were even the Hokkien platoons (where they can't even converse in Mandarin). There were malay, tamil and other language speaking soldiers.Those days ===> 60s and 70s.
We wore name tags with different coloured backgrounds from 1975. Green for English, orange for Mandarin, red for Hokkien, yellow for Tamil, blue for Malay and purple for others (like Teochew speaking). The background colour is for your main language. It would be green if you are english educated. Then, if you could also speak mandarin proficiently, a little orange colour is added to the right end of the tag. You could add several colours if you speak several languages proficiently.
Back to BOBO. As the chinese helicoptered (derogatory term to describe the chinese educated by the english educated) usually mispronounced english terms, they pronounced WOWO as BOBO. We used to joke about it but somehow the term appar to stick since. Trust me. I enlisted in 1973.
posted by Immortali @ 10:18 pm
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