h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My school chums and I always called this game "Telephone"!

Just thought someone would be interested...

-Lucrecia

Around here, it's always been called "Whisper Down the Alley"

We call it "Telephone Arabe" (the arabic telephone), for some reason. I should look up the origin of that name...

I've never heard it called anything but telephone, the only variation is that in telepone if you didn't hear the person beside you say anything but "mumble-mumble", you can say "operator" and have them repeat the word.

we call it the whisper game. I remember playing it in kindergarten and deliberately changing to words for fun. Of course the grown-ups would ruin my whole plot by asking each child what they had heard and passed on, pinpointing me as the wiseguy.

The "telephone" part of the French name seems quite obvious, as the whole thing is about passing a message from point A to point B, which is what telephones usually do.

As for the "arabic" part...
Pretty much like "Chinese", I guess, from a European point of view : at the end of the game, the word/sentence that was supposed to be passed on can be distorted so much that it does not sound like proper English (French, etc.), but more like an unknown, mysterious language (Arabic, Chinese).
Equally mysterious are "Ombres chinoises" (shaddow games) and "Casse-tete chinois" (puzzles)...

Like when, in French, when someone is speaking too much of technical mumbo-jumbo, you can stop them and say "tu me parles chinois" ("you're speaking Chinese to me").

(We had a meeting recently with a technical guy from France, and he got lost in explanations that nobody cared about. I used the phrase to let him know that he had lost us all. And the whole chinese-speaking audience found it very amusing...)

Is French the only language in which, um, "ethnic" expressions ("rascist" might be more appropriate) are commonplace ? "C'est du travail d'arabe", "Tete de Turc", "Travailler comme un negre" and a number of antisemite expressions

Actually people are now avoiding these expressions for obvious reasons but hey, they're part or the patrimoine culturel, n'est-ce pas ?

tried to use italics here... it appears you can't ; Mea Culpa