Whoah, Nellie!

You know how they say that when you have sex with someone, you're also having sex with everyone that person has ever had sex with? With that in mind, did you ever wonder how many times you've fucked a horse?

後識字

I've long felt the need for a Chinese equivalent to Japanese wapurō-baka and now I finally have one, thanks to this Los Angeles Times article: tíbǐwàngzì (提筆忘字). Literally, this means "pick up brush, forget character". (The Japanese, a contraction of "word processor idiot", is more explicit regarding the cause of the phenomenon.)

It's a linguistically sound article overall, with only a couple of questionable statements. One is:

The Chinese do more text messaging than anybody else in the world, perhaps because it is an inexpensive way to communicate and because the Chinese language can squeeze a lot of information into a small space. (One example is a single character, pronounced "zha," which means the red dots that appear on your nose when you are drunk.)

Sure enough, the character 皻 zhā does exist and is glossed by Lin Yu-tang as "Red blotch (esp. on nose from excessive drinking)". But he follows this with the compound 酒皻 jiǔzhā (酒 means "alcoholic beverage"), which is probably the more frequent form given that zhā in isolation could also mean "investigate" (its most common meaning), "pierce", and "dregs". At this length, it's no more impressive an example of compression than say, German Fahne ("the smell of alcohol on one's breath") or English punt.

But that's a quibble. There are the usual quotes about the ineffable cultural patrimony that is lost when someone writes jiǔzhā instead of 酒皻, but the author of the piece remains agnostic. It's a refreshing change from that piece of NYT garbage recently trashed by Language Log.