From his vantage point of working with the English language behind the Bamboo Firewall, friend of RAMH Froog wages what must at times feel like a lonely battle against Chinglish. (For the uninitiated, this is the generally mangled result of applying Chinese grammatical rules, pronunciations, and mindset to ideas expressed in “English.”)
I have no wish to steal her punchline, so I will just point you to The Intern’s recent post. It’s an exquisite example (even if just a joke, or a PhotoShopped image*) of a related but different phenomenon: a phrase in “Chinese” which sounds as if it means something wildly (in)appropriate in English.
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* Not a joke, apparently: Someone on a snopes.com forum has tracked it down. It’s currently listed (about halfway down this page) as a retailer of books for Oxford University Press (China).
Froog says
Whale oil beef hooked, as we used to say in college.
DarcKnyt says
I’ve been in that place my whole life. That’s pretty funny. :)
Froog says
Tried to leave a comment yesterday, but it vanished into the ether. Spam filters acting up again??
John says
Froog: You must have had one interesting circle of friends in college.
(You were caught in the spam filter indeed. Not sure what’s up with that; you seem to have been singled out, dating roughly back to when you signed up with the VPN. “Whitelisting” you doesn’t work — at least not indefinitely. I’ll look into it.)
Darc: Ha! Yeah — sometimes I feel that way, too, about a book I’m writing at a given moment. ;)
marta says
That’s a good laugh.