Random new word of the day

[Jim]

各漾 - Beijing dialect for "stomach-turning", 恶心, few other ways of writing it apparently: https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/2270573105559912308.html

[Tomsima]

罹患

 

'suffer from a serious disease'. Probably not a new word for many, but I only learnt it a few days ago playing Two Point Hospital, and it just came up in my reading on capital punishment. Think that qualifies for word of the day!

[Tomsima]

組織

 

more medical reading today. I thought there was a typo when I bumped into 組織, as im so used to seeing it in political/economic articles. I was pretty surprised to learn it actually means 'tissue' in medical contexts.

[Shelley]

@Lu Just because it might be interesting or useful to you, here in the UK - baseboard, toe kick - is called skirting board.

[Tomsima]

初潮

 

was a bit embarrassing interpreting today when i didnt quite get what the speaker was talking about. Unfortunately 月經 was also used and I just couldn't remember it despite having studied. Almost certainly the result of being a male, I hang my head in shame!

[murrayjames]

12 hours ago, Tomsima said:

初潮

 

12 hours ago, Tomsima said:

was a bit embarrassing interpreting today when i didnt quite get what the speaker was talking about

 

Didn’t know this word. Double-checked its meaning with the missus.

 

“First tide.” Don’t feel too bad. Men are bad with this stuff even in their native language.

 

Do you remember what sentence you heard the word in?

[Tomsima]

good to know im not the only one. the whole thing was a bit of a blur to be honest, i can only say it came up in the context of a talk on the treatment of different types of diabetes, in the section on gestational diabetes (妊娠型糖尿病 for those interested) 

[Lu]

桥梁书 qiáoliáng shū chapter books: books for children who read well enough to graduate from picture books. Story mostly told in text, but with illustrations, and divided in easy-to-digest chapters. Funny thing is that this word, to my knowledge, does not exist in Dutch. I was not even aware of the concept (though that might be because I don't know any children in the relevant age), although the thing itself of course exists in abundance.

 

From a filmed interview with a children's book author. With pretty bad audio. Glad Pleco could make sense of the pinyin of my third attempt (caoliang shu? No. Chaoliang perhaps? No. Listened again - qiaoliang? Aha!)

[zander1]

泔水 gan1shui3 - Dirty water, slop.

[murrayjames]

1 hour ago, zander1 said:

泔水 gan1shui3 - Dirty water, slop.

 

Interesting! Your post is my first encounter with the Chinese character 泔. Its the 5880th most frequently used character, according to 现代汉语单字频率列表 .

 

[zander1]

34 minutes ago, murrayjames said:

Your post is my first encounter with the Chinese character 泔

 

It was mine too! I think 泔水 and 米泔水 are probably the only times you're going to encounter it.

[imron]

8 hours ago, murrayjames said:

Its the 5880th most frequently used character, according to 现代汉语单字频率列表 .

At 1 million characters a year, and based on that frequency, you can expect to see it once every 3 years.

[Jim]

You used to see 泔 a bit more in the countryside with people collecting slops to feed their pigs (probably illegal most places now).

[murrayjames]

4 hours ago, imron said:

At 1 million characters a year, and based on that frequency, you can expect to see it once every 3 years.

 

Good to know! It took me a few minutes to figure out how you came up with that number. You’re an interesting dude, @imron.

 

For the curious:

 

(99.9746377359 - 99.9746005274) ÷ 100 = x ÷ 1,000,000
x = 0.372085

 

So 泔 appears 0.372085 times per million characters, or once per three million characters (approximately). At a million characters a year, that’s once every three years.

[Publius]

46 minutes ago, murrayjames said:

For the curious:

 

(99.9746377359 - 99.9746005274) ÷ 100 = x ÷ 1,000,000
x = 0.372085 

Haha, I took a different route.

I calculated the size of the corpus based on the first entry '的':

7922684 / 4.09432531783% = 193504018 (approx. 2亿)

Then the frequency for '泔':

72 / 193504018 = 3.72085297e-7  (千万分之3.72085297 or 百万分之0.372085297)

[imron]

I did it the same as murrayjames.

 

[zander1]

娓娓道来 wei3wei3dao4lai2 - To talk continuously and pleasingly.

[Jim]

团员媳妇, another word for a 童养媳 - a child taken in by a family to be raised as a future bride for one of their own.

[Jim]

哑火 - misfire (of a gun etc) or a bomb etc fizzling out without going off. Saw it in context of former but looking it up to check apparently can also be used to mean something like keep quiet about something/keep mum.

[Tomsima]

On 4/4/2019 at 2:16 PM, Jim said:

哑火

finally got time to sit down and get through some new words. Ive asked a few people about this word, and it seems to be almost synonymous with 熄火. However, a quick google/baidu image search seems to indicate their usages are different: 熄火 is as expected used mostly about car ignition, whereas 啞火 suggests frequent usage in sport, perhaps in the sense of 'putting out a threat' on the opposing team. If so this would suggest an active usage of 'snuff out', quite different from 'misfire', but please correct me if this is wrong.