Category Archives: Folk speech

오비이락 烏飛梨落

Nationality: Korean American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Torrence, California
Performance Date: April 20, 2016
Primary Language: Korean
Language: English

My informant is a student who originally came from Korea, but moved with her family to Los Angeles since her middle school.

 

烏飛梨落

오비이락

Bird flies away, Pear drops off.

 

My informant told me Korean also use this kind of  four-word phrases to convey some philosophy as Chinese people do; many of them are written in Chinese characters but pronounced in Korean.

For this specific one, she said, “You didn’t do anything, but something happens coincidentally, then people think you did it.”

It is quite interesting to me that there are many metaphors like this in asian cultures, which I think more or less relates to their hieroglyphic language (especially traditional Chinese) that allows them to randomly connect two things that share similar features together.

 

看颜值 Score of Face

“2016年人丑就要多读书，体胖就要多跑步，又丑又胖的童鞋们，读书和跑步这两项运动似乎都不大适合你，狗带吧！2016年讲段子也得看颜值了！”

“In the year of 2016, READ more if you were ugly, RUN more if you were a fat-ass. For those who are both ugly and fat, stop wasting your time, just GO DIE! In the year of 2016, you have to look good even for telling this kind of joke!”

The popular culture in China nowadays has an unusual spotlight on people’s face, and there is a standard look that pleases the majority people. Ironically, that standard is based on the look of western people. Many people there have spent lots of many to do the surgery in order to look more “beautiful,” which are stereotyped into big eyes, high nose, small face… This almost became a “must” standard for the majority to judge on others, they call it “Score of Face.”

I think this is a funny, ridiculous and creepy phenomenon that people want to fit the arbitrary standard of beauty, and eventually they almost all look the same.

 

 

 

Reference:

http://lizhi.shangc.net/a/201601/12159.html

Where’s the toilet?

Nationality: American
Age: 60
Occupation: Director, Animator, Professor
Residence: Brooklyn, New York
Performance Date: March 23, 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

My informant is an American from New York, whose family originally came from Poland 100 years ago. His grandfather was a baker and his grandmother was a peasant girl.

“I learnt the amount of Polish from her, my grandmother, and it’s funny that because she was a peasant girl, when you say something like ‘where’s the toilet?’ to her it meant ‘you go out to as far with the shovel,’ coz there is no toilet, hahahaha, so that was her word for it. So after that once I went to fancy restaurant with my Polish friends, they were just complimenting on my Polish, and then I asked in Polish, my intention was to ask where is restroom, but literally it means ‘where’s the hole?’ as I asked. Then they were like laughing so badly, hahaha.”

I think it’s really an interesting scenario of people from different generations communicating with each other, in which they would bring in the phrases or terms that were generated only during their specific time period. In this case we can see that people tend to use more primitive and simple phrases in old days because of the less advanced progress of human inventions they had, and later on they use more concise words to convey the concept of those more complicated things that had been invented afterwards.

王八蛋 Son of a bitch

A “wángbādàn 忘/王八蛋” is the offspring of a woman lacking virtue. Another meaning of 王八 is 鼈 biē, fresh-water turtle.[4] Turtle heads reemerging from hiding in the turtle’s shell look like the glans emerging from the foreskin, and turtles lay eggs. So a “wang ba” is a woman who has lost her virtue, and a “wang ba dan” is the progeny of such a woman, a turtle product, but, figuratively, also a penis product.

This profanity term has actually been widely used in China for many years, and it is a pretty offensive one to use. I find in both western and eastern culture, it is considered to be very offensive one when the subject is related to close family members.

 

安利 Amway/Brainwash

This word is also a very popular phrase that has been widely used online for these couple years in China.
The word now means strongly recommending somebody to do something.
Usually the person who uses it personally likes the subject so much and therefore wants to share with others so badly.
The interesting thing is, the word itself actually originates from an American marketing company Amway, the sub company of which has a huge reputation for being overly persuasive when they try to sell their products in China. Then people started making fun of that company and using the word “安利” (Amway) as a verb instead of a noun to describe the behavior of strongly recommending others to try something.
Moreover, as the word has been widely spread on the Internet, it tends to mean more like “brainwash” when people use it for fun.