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In reference to the character Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton in the opera Madama Butterfly (first performed in 1904) by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924).
When I’m with my white partner, I am a proponent of the ‘Pinkerton Syndrome’, a caricature not unlike the Other Asia’s mail order bride.
2001, Neil Humphreys, Notes from an Even Smaller Island, Singapore: Times Books International, →ISBN, page 213:
Like vampires, the ang moh crowd comes out at night, dressed in their best shirts and armed with plenty of tax-free Singapore dollars to woo those local darlings tragically struck down by the Pinkerton syndrome. Like the character in Madame Butterfly, they are somehow lured by the attraction of drunken voices and the possibility of a fat wallet.
The Pinkerton Syndrome, then, seems to me non-operative in American cultural masculinity at the moment. […] Pinkerton's casual imperialist hubris, an expression of first-generation Manifest Destiny complete with brass-buttoned naval uniform, has an official status that lone action heroes as implicitly populist individuals must stay well clear of. No, the condition is really much more suited to Europeans.
2015, Chris Hudson, “Dangerous Sexuality in Singapore: The Sarong Party Girl”, in Adeline Koh, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, editors, Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia: Engendering Discourse in Singapore and Malaysia (Routledge Research on Gender in Asia Series; 8), Abingdon, Oxon., New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN:
The home-wrecking bimbo who had succumbed to the Pinkerton Syndrome had been transformed into a 'bad girl' – a phenomenon not unfamiliar to Asian societies – and recovered for herself an empowered cultural agency.
The language of writers who are safely dead, and can be studied without fear of their exerting a subversive influence, bears the respectable label 'old Scots dialect'; the same tongue spoken by the living compatriots of these writers is 'bad grammar'. This attitude is of course not new; though perhaps seldom expressed so blatantly. I call it the Pinkerton syndrome, after one of the many memorable figures in out national gallimaufray of scholarly eccentrics. John Pinkerton (1758–1826), poet, critic, historian, dramatist and Celtophobe, in 1786 produced a book, entitled Ancient Scotish Poems, never before in print: e wrote: "none can more sincerely wish a total extinction of the Scotish colloquial dialect than I do, for there are few modern Scoticisms which are not barbarisms ... Yet, I believe, no man of either kingdom would wish an extinction of the Scotish dialect in poetry." This is the Pinkerton syndrome: the practice of paying lip-service, and sometimes much more than this, to the Scottish culture of the past while denigrating the Scots language of the present. And it is still prevalent today.
James Beattie personifies the Pinkerton syndrome perfectly, for, while publishing lists of Scotticisms to be avoided, he still found time to write the occasional verse in Scots himself.
