Slanging match

• Source: Global Times
• [00:14 February 10 2010]
• Comments

By Vera Penêda

Photo: Courtesy of Eveline Chao

Gāisǐde(Holy crap!), nǐxiāya? (Are you blind?), pōfù (bitch), all the way to cāonǐmā (fuck you!)… this article could provide enough foul language to make even a hooker blush.

Niubi! Eveline Chao's publishing debut aims to make us all, sinologists and newbies alike, become proficient Chinese slangers with "a lot of insight into Chinese language and society."

Once you get your hands (or mouth) on the script you can decide if the irreverent guide is truly niúbī (fucking awesome), kù (cool) or just gǒushǐ (bullshit, literally "dog shit").

As dirty as possible

"I actually said no because I didn't feel qualified. However, once a friend planted the seed in my mind, I started doing research into what Chinese slang books were out there. I realized that there was a need for a better organized and more fun-to-read Chinese slang book," says Chao.

The up and coming author discovered published slang books "outdated or too regional… they lacked really basic things like pinyin and tone marks. And a lot of them were just plain boring."

Chao decided to write "as dirty as possible." The slang guide covers different subjects, like flirting, insults, sex, gay jargon and more recent born Internet terms. It includes pinyin and tone marks, along with phonetic pronunciations, making it easy for even a novice with slender grasp of Chinese language.

Chapter five – "Sex and Body Parts" – and chapter seven – "Behaving Badly" – are as hot as any XXX channel on TV, while gay slang is introduced as "The pleasures of the bitten peach and the passion of the cut sleeve." The dirtiest in the book are the bi words, Chao says, and a few others "for extremely specific acts, which mostly come from Japanese porn."

Call out bed

"Aaaahhhhhh, aaahhhhh, wooooooo"… any aaahing and wooing, onomatopoeic creative writing makes an orgasm seem more exciting than simply using the word itself. The same applies to musical expressions such as chuīxiāo, "play the bamboo flute" or chuī kǒuqín, "play the harmonica" to talk about oral sex. This is but one of the situations when colorful slang tops respectful words, working as a more "honest" vernacular to unveil what politically correct lexicon may conceal.

"Slang is sort of like that – because there's this sense that they're not 'real' words somehow, it enables us to talk about things we can't talk about normally. And they're things that cover some of the most fundamental elements of being human – sex, anger, etc – so they're things that need to come out and be talked about, one way or another," Chao explains.

"I know a Chinese couple that feels too embarrassed to talk dirty to each other in Chinese but have a lot of fun doing it in English. And I know Americans who will happily talk about "lādùzi" but are uncomfortable saying 'diarrhea' in English."

Another of slang's valuable lessons resides precisely in the exercise of interpreting the dirty talk. Chao explains how she discovered her favorite nasty words. "I'm most fascinated by words that describe situations that don't have a name in English. There's an insult for a man who's shorter than his wife or girlfriend: bàncánfèi – literally 'half cripple.' When a woman moans, specifically in the context of sex, it's jiàochūn, literally 'call out bed.'"

Just like tone and context inject words with unsaid meanings, slang also reveals more than it says about a society and its people. "I also find it interesting that there's a word for a romantic relationship between a teacher and a student – or 'teacher-student love' – which reveals how common such relationships are in China."