What it means
The Singaporean art of reserving a seat at a hawker centre by dropping a packet of tissues on the table before you go queue for food. Completely unofficial but universally respected, move someone elses tissue packet and you will get the death glare of your life. The word itself comes from choose, but it has evolved into a full verb for claiming anything, a table, a parking spot, a spot in line.
Usage examples
"Eh quick lah, chope that corner table with your tissue packet before that group in matching shirts gets there, I go and buy the chicken rice first"
"Eh quick lah, chope that corner table by the noodle stall of the Maxwell Hawker Centre with your tissue packet from your handbag before that group in matching company shirts from the office tower across the street gets there before us, I go and buy the chicken rice from the famous queue of the second floor stall first while you reserve the four seats of the family."
"My uncle at the Bedok Interchange Food Centre last Sunday morning of the weekly breakfast tradition forgot to chope our usual table by the window of the second row of the second pillar of the central section, came back with the kaya toast and two kopi from the queue of stall number twenty-three of the second corner, the table was completely occupied by a group of teenagers, the uncle wasted no time and parked his coffee on the only available stool of the smaller table."
Where it comes from
From the Cantonese verb chop (to mark, to stamp), itself borrowed into Singaporean English through the colonial-era Chinese trading community of the city-state, with the addition of the final -e to soften the consonant cluster in line with the phonetics of Singlish. The practice of placing a packet of tissues on a table at the hawker centre as informal reservation crystallized in the public food courts of Singapore through the nineteen seventies, when the centralized hawker stalls replaced the street vendors of the colonial era, and the system of the tissue-packet chope has become so entrenched in Singaporean daily life that the rule is respected by every generation despite never being written into any official regulation.
Other ways to say it
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