Random new word of the day

[zander1]

On 12/19/2018 at 8:54 AM, Alex_Hart said:

被旅游 "to be touristed"; literally to be taken on a vacation by the authorities in order to get you away from big events, also perhaps a bribe to keep you quiet

 

Theres an article on this in this week’s New Yorker 

[zander1]

12 hours ago, 889 said:

vent in Chinese? It would be quite useful to know sometimes.

 

Depends on the context really,

 

发泄 like you said is fine, as is 解气although I’ve mainly seen both in the context to let off anger. Obviously both do overlap with the English vent a lot and are often interchangeable. 

 

If you wanted to use ‘vent’ to specifically mean complain, get something off your chest, I’ve seen 诉苦 used quite a few times too. 

[Tomsima]

Just to be clear 倾诉、诉苦 etc are about venting as in complaining using 诉 for this English meaning, words relating to letting off in a more abstract way will use 泄

[Tomsima]

Just came across these relics in a  news article from 1999

 

BP機 beeper/pager

电视商场 teleshopping

 

 

 

[Jim]

Venting is one of the senses of 吐槽 as well.

[Alex_Hart]

14 hours ago, zander1 said:

Theres an article on this in this week’s New Yorker 

I cited it in the original post; you can click the blue underlined word to see links. 

[Tomsima]

血漬 bloodstain (this came up in 流星蝴蝶劍 in the phrase “鞋尖上染著塊血漬”)

 

茶漬 tea stain (this came up in a conversation with someone about my teeth yellowing from drinking too much coffee and tea)

 

[Tomsima]

燃烧瓶 molotov cocktail

 

突然前方出现一座断桥，目标车辆穿越桥洞，并沿途投掷燃烧瓶。

[Lu]

肉豆蔻 ròudòukòu nutmeg Such a fun word!

And clove is 丁香 dīngxiāng, same as in Dutch where we call it 'spice nail' (kruidnagel). I don't know what word came first and I don't really care, it's fun that they are the same.

[Lu]

长镜头 cháng jìngtóu

This word is so ambiguous that its Baidu entry spends the first paragraph explaining what it doesn't mean. It's not a very long camera lens. It's also not keeping the camera far away from the subject. It means what in English is simply a 'long take': filming a scene for a long period of time without stopping in between. I feel Chinese really did itself a disfavour when it decided to use 镜头 for two very related but very different things.

[Geiko]

On 1/20/2019 at 11:01 PM, Lu said:

clove is 丁香 dīngxiāng, same as in Dutch where we call it 'spice nail' (kruidnagel).

 

It's also true for other European languages: the word 'clove' comes from Latin 'clavus', which means "nail", and in Latin languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese or Italian, the word for clove and nail is the same: clavo, clou de girofle, cravo da India, chiodi di garofano... 

 

ETA: I found this website, which discusses the etymology of clove in many languages, I don't know how reliable it is, though. 

 

Quote

The first part of that name, ding [丁], typi­cally means small thing, chunk; it also de­notes a specific cut­ting technique to chop meats into rather small pieces, and a male sur­name; it does not mean nail. Yet, I think that the original meaning of ding xiang might also have been nail spice: First, the shape of the Chinese character 丁 evolved from a nail, and the modern language has a homo­phonous word ding[钉] nail (the nailcharacter is com­posed of jin [金] metal with the phonetic com­plement ding [丁] and thus means a thing made from metal and spoken ding). Second, the Korean chong-hyang is written 釘香 in the now obsolete Sino–Korean writing, using the traditional variant of the nailcharacter. Perhaps, such a spelling was also possible in an earlier stage of Chinese, although 钉香 is not valid in the contemporary language.

 

[Lu]

框架小说 kuàngjià xiǎoshuō frame story, frame narrative

Found the Chinese translation of this term through the tried and true method of making an educated guess and googling around with variants of that until something correct comes to the surface.

[Tomsima]

反芻

fǎnchú

Chew the cud (literally, when cows regurgitate and rechew

Mull over (figurative)

 

I liked this, as it appears to match the English phrase almost exactly in both senses

[Tomsima]

瞬移 

teleportation

 

this actually came up during english to chinese direction interpreting, and the consensus seems to be 瞬移 is the best translation for the english concept 'teleportation'. One of the other students was saying he actually learnt the word from watching dragonball Z in chinese...which from memory is 'instant transmission' in the english translation. still not sure, but im gonna use 瞬移 until something better comes up.

[murrayjames]

羊圈 yángjuàn - sheep pen

猪圈 zhūjuàn - pig pen

 

Today, after some 12 years of studying Chinese, I learned that the character 圈 in words like 羊圈 is pronounced juàn, not quān.

[Lu]

踢脚线, also 踢脚板 tījiǎoxiàn, tījiǎobǎn baseboard, the strip of wood (or other material) on the foot of the wall. I also learned the word 'baseboard'.

[murrayjames]

@Lu, interesting that 踢脚板 is the Chinese word for a strip on the bottom of a wall. The similar English word “toe kick” refers to a strip on the bottom of a base cabinet. It is not necessarily made of wood.

 

“Wainscoting” is another good English word to know.

[889]

学习

 

“Beyond making Party messages passively available, as Party newspapers and state-controlled media have done for decades, the app commands engagement, by which users can earn 'Xi Study Points' (学习积分).”

 

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/02/16/dawn-little-red-smartphone-chinas-digital-dictatorship/

 

Talk about predestination.

 

 

[Tomsima]

Thank you for finally explaining why half the websites I use have suddenly in the last month or so suddenly all got a red banner at the top saying 學習時刻.....

[imron]

On 2/16/2019 at 1:22 PM, 889 said:

the app commands engagement

This is scary.  Imagine your career advancement being determined by how much you had studied the thoughts of the leader of your country - and the phone/app tracking your every interaction so that it would know if you'd been cheating the system.  A brave new world indeed.