Last year I went from Lanzhou to Xiahe, a Tibetan stronghold, by bus. I had read in a book about the Silk Road that this would involve an “eight hour hair-raising bus trip” and looked →
Despite the charms of the Chinese train and that to travel hopefully (and painfully) is better than … not at all, it’s always good to arrive when the destination is beautiful Lanzhou. It’s the most →
Yes, although this isn’t strictly about language and certainly not Cantonese as I’m Mando-jabbering all day long, I want to put these postings from my blog www.chinadroll.com here as well. Travel broadens the mind, narrows →
Oh, whoops, how did a burqa sneak in there? Must have been the word ‘black’. Anyway, so most of my students have the same complaint: No matter how good their Cantonese is, Hong Kong people →
I’ve just come back from another Russian lesson with the excellent Dimitri. People: You think Cantonese is difficult – try Russian. Every word, I mean noun, adjective, verb and adverb, has hundreds of different forms. →
So, last Friday, July 1st, I went to Victoria Park to check out the action and also make a podcast: Happy Jellyfish’s Outcast at 1st of July Extravaganza 2011 Oh, it was great. The carnival-like →
Friday I went to Victoria Park to see what the people are against this year. Many of them were very against Stephen Lam (林瑞麟）Lam Seui Leun, who they called a (something) dog. Not running dog, →
There is something about the internet that brings out the worst in people, like road rage. But also, of course, the best. People become so kind on behalf of others, on the internet. Last week, →
Recently I’ve … not exactly been inundated with invitations to be friends with people on Facebook, but had a few requests. The people who want to, oh how I hate this noun as a verb, →
It is with great sadness I must inform our irate but faithful listeners that Poddie Castie number 200 is soon coming up, and that it will herald →
Imagine – they didn’t know that arachibutyrophobia is fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth! Talk about ignorance.
Inspired by this I visited a phobia website. If you thought boring old “fear of spiders” or “fear of being buried alive” was anything to be proud of, think again.
Our dear chaps up north, as well as, to a certain degree, our own bowtie-ridden so-called leaders down here in Hong Kong, all seem to suffer en masse by the dreaded allodaxaphobia – a fear of opinions.
If they, being Chinese, in addition suffered from consecotaleophobia, they’d be in serious trouble, as it means “fear of chopsticks.”
Dikephobia (fear of justice) would be right up their street though.
Before I read the list, I considered myself fairly sane and phobia-free. Now it appears I have a couple, notably geniophobia (fear of chins) (mine, though, not others’) and arithmophobia. As the latter means “fear of numbers, I’d say that’s “fear” enough. I don’t only fear numbers but hate them with a vengeance.
Reading through the list with increasing incredulousness, I couldn’t help thinking: Are these phobias just made up for fun or have there been people being diagnosed with them and the doctor having to make up the word, or being diagnosed and the doctor finding there was already a thing called for example nomatophobia (fear of names)?
That particular phobia would make it quite inconvenient to exist in normal society I’d imagine, much harder than suffering from for example sesquipedalophobia, a fear of long words, which are easier to avoid than names – indeed some people manage to spend a lifetime without encountering a single one.
I read in a book of psychology once that phobias are mere projections – other fears or hatreds in one’s life which one feels are not quite comme il faut to express; as in: Hate your father but can’t face up to it? Come down with a fear of buttons instead! (I forget the greek term for this but I’ve seen it on TV.) Frustrated and angry with work and life in general? Express it by becoming deadly afraid of bananas!
The idea is that when you have a phobia, you can have a semblance of control over your life by avoiding the thing you’re afraid of. Yes, you know where you are with arachibutyrophobia; all you have to do is stay away from peanut butter-related situations like breakfast. You can probably even be in the same room as peanut butter, as long as you avoid it sticking to the roof of your mouth.
Of course, if your phobia of choice is phobophobia (you guessed it: A fear of phobias) you’re pretty much shafted. And don’t get me started on chronophobia, the fear of time. Unavoidable! I feel really sorry for the thousands and thousands suffering from that one.
Oh dear, is that the time? I’d better go to bed. I just hope I don’t wake up in the morning with a nasty case of cacophobia. If I do, my days in Hong Kong are numbered, because it means a fear of ugliness…
Summer has come to Pui O beach and with it a slew of … I think they call them ‘pseudo-models’? and their entourages of dozens of photographers and light-reflector-holders, all men, for some reason.
Referring to yesterday’s post about to be or not to be, I can’t tell you how many of my students want so, so badly to use to be (係, hai) before an adjective. And why wouldn’t they? Unless they’re from another Asian country, it’s deeply entrenched in their mother tongue to say ‘the girl IS beautiful’. But that’s not Chinese. In Chinese: 女仔好靚(leoi tsai hou leeng (female boy well beautiful). The thing about Chinese, wishful thinking absolutely doesn’t work.
So it’s not 佢"係"靚仔" (keui “hai” leeng tsai, he IS handsome-boy) but 佢好靚仔 (keui HOU leeng tsai, he WELL handsome-boy). It’s, as they say, just the way it is…
Learn more about this without really trying by downloading the Bureau’s two Cantonese instruction videos Cantonese – The Movie and Going Native. You can find them on this very site under the heading SHOP
This is one of the reasons why I love Cantonese: 咩! (Meeh, wot? or what kind of…)
My theory: It started out as 乜嘢 (mat yeh, what thing. As in: 你飲乜嘢呀？Lei yam mat yeh ah? You drink what thing ah – what are you drinking?). A good Cantonese expression that Mandohooligans can’t understand, in speech or writing. And then (again this is my theory but I think a good’n:) it slowly compressed into one word: Meh (咩）taking the beginning from the mat and the end from the yeh.
And then MEH took on its own life, meaning ‘what kind of’ as in 你飲咩啤酒呀? (Lei yam meh beh jau ah? You drink what kind of beer?) But it created a conundrum. How to write it? Normally in Cantonese if a word doesn’t have its own character you just take a word that sounds identical or similar and slap a ‘mouth’ character (口）on it. Like 呀 (ah) that comes from the word 牙 (tooth). But there is no ‘meh’ sound in Cantonese. What did they do? Wrote it as ‘the sound of a goat’! (Or sheep.) 咩(meeeeeeh!) Goat falling off a mountain!
By the way, the above photo was taken on an excellent day in Inner Mongolia, hitch-hiking through the wilderness.
喂！ 你搵乜嘢呀！ (Wei! Lei wan mat yeh ah? Hey! What are you looking for?)
