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Thursday, March 6, 2003 |
You pay your money and you take your choice
There's a mention of the phrase "tong teen" in a recent story in the SF Chronicle, referring to it as a Cambodian lottery. I'm wondering if the word was brought over from Europe in colonial times, as a variation on "tontine".A tontine is an old fashioned form of life insurance, where a group invests money early on (often for their children), and then as you age, the group gets dividends. As the group members die, the tontine's dividend gets split between fewer members, and the last survivor gets the tontine's capital.
I first learned this word when I saw the comedy The Wrong Box while growing up; it opens up with a montage of the humorous fates of most of the tontine members, reducing the tontine to a manageable number of characters. (My favorite is the old man in the coal mine, grumbling about his miners safety complaints. "Why, this mine is as sound as the Bank of England", and he pokes one wall with his cane. Boom! Fade to next scene.).
