When I asked my Dad, “How much longer until we get there?” he would answer, “How Long is a Chinaman’s name?” As a joke, it was only middling funny. I didn’t get it the first time he used it. He kept using it anyway, and it became one of those jokes that’s funny just because two people keep repeating it forever.

It’s probably racist now, isn’t it?

When I did something my Grandma didn’t want me to do, she would say something that sounded like, “Nichts kommer aus in the Dutchman’s house!” I knew what she meant, even though I still don’t know exactly what she said.

Is “Dutchman” a racist stereotype the way “Chinaman” is?

When I was only five or six years old, I remember my Mom singing the first two lines of “Mississippi Mud” to me as we rocked back and forth on the front porch swing:

The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out,
The people get together and they all begin to shout …

I remember those first two lines clearly because, fifteen years later, while watching the television show M*A*S*H, I heard Harry Morgan (as loony nutjob General Bartford Hamilton Steele, not as Sherman Potter) sing a version of “Mississippi Mud” that my mother spared me from:

The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out,
The darkies get together and they all begin to shout

I’m a great big raving bigot for repeating that, aren’t I?