half-and-halfs

Updated: May 13, 2025

‘None of your Rommany chies, young fellow,’ said the tall girl, looking more menacingly than before, and clenching her fist; ‘you had better be civil, I am none of your chies; and though I keep company with gypsies, or, to speak more proper, half-and-halfs, I would have you to know that I come of Christian blood and parents, and was born in the great house of Long Melford.’

George Henry Borrow - Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest

He had not, so far, come across many specimens of these pathetic half-and-halfs, who seemed to inhabit a racial No-Man's-Land. But Lahore was full of them; minor officials in the Railway and the Post Office; living, more or less, in a substratum of their own kind. He gathered that they were regarded as a 'problem' by the thoughtful few, and simply turned down by the rest.

Maud Diver - Far to Seek: A Romance of England and India

None of your Rommany chies, young fellow, said the tall girl, looking more menacingly than before, and clenching her fist; 'you had better be civil, I am none of your chies; and though I keep company with gypsies, or, to speak more proper, half-and-halfs, I would have you to know that I come of Christian blood and parents, and was born in the great house of Long Melford.

George Henry Borrow - Lavengro; the Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest