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by lupire 592 days ago
(No need to Orientalize to defamiarize, especially when a huge fraction of the audience is Chinese, so Orientalizing doesn't defamiliarize. Game of Whispers or Telephone works fine.)
2 comments

Do the Chinese call it English Whispers?
Chinese-Americans, at least, call it a game of Telephone, like everyone else in the English-speaking world except for the actual English.

We call it “Telephone” because “Chinese Whispers” not only sounds racist, it is also super confusing. You need a lot of cultural context to understand the particular way in which Chinese whispers would be different from any other set of whispers.

I happened to re-read this, and to be clear, I'm not Chinese-American. the "we" there means "everyone else in the English-speaking world except for the actual English."
It’s all Greek to them.
Pardon my French.