Sep. 18th, 2007

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I'm trying to be really good about looking up Chinese words I don't know as they occur to me. Hopefully, if I throw enough at this sieve-like brain of mine, some stuff will clog. Yesterday, I realised I didn't know any word for "arm". This morning, I couldn't remember why I wanted to talk about arms, but I did remember to look the word up. The translation my dictionary gave was 臂 .

Uh-oh.

I trust you all remember my story of the student who wanted to borrow a writing implement (筆 ) and ended up asking for the use of a cunt (屄 )? Then it occurred to me that there's yet another body part pronounced "bee", the nose (鼻 ). A trip to the doctor was looking like a hairy prospect. "你被打擊了在哪裏?"

But then I was reading my short story on the train and the narrator was talking about being pulled along by her 胳膊 gēbo. Hurrah! Another word for "arm" that doesn't sound like any other word I know, let along something obscene. It also occurred to me later that nose usually appears in the form 鼻子 bízi, so that should be hard to confuse with something else. (Let's hope that the Pekinese don't do something horrible to it like replace the 子 with 兒 ér.)
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