Slippery characters

One of the little mysteries we brought back from Chinatown with us travelled on a package of noodles. The Old Man has a Mid-Autumn vegetarian feast planned for tonight and he wanted a noodle course. The grocery carried several varieties of 拉麵 or hand-pulled noodles, and we opted for a thicker variety labeled "爽滑". These are both characters which look familiar but I don't really know. (I feel like I need a term for this parallel to 提筆忘字; perhaps 認字不清?)

The first one was a bastard to find. It clearly and quite centrally contains the element 大, so you'd naturally assume that was the radical. But since this is Chinese, it's not, it's one of only two characters listed under 爻 (the other being the transcription-oriented 爾). I felt better about not really knowing what it meant when I saw the fuzzy lexicographical attempts to define it. Lin Yu-tang gives "to fail in promise; to err" alongside "exhilarating; high-spirited; forthright". Wiktionary and the Oxford Chinese give "happy" and "refreshing", and McCawley has something similar. nciku explains "Originally used to mean being comfortable and cheerful. Now it refers to feel delighted and happy, or intoxicated with something."

In fact, since the second character, 滑, contained the water radical, I initially assumed that it was the name of a river, that 爽滑 together denoted a place name, and that therefore the literal meaning of each character was unimportant. So I was chagrinned to determine that 滑 huá actually used to be in my active vocabulary. Its meaning is "slippery" which helped explain why, in tiny print on the back of the package, I found the gloss "slippery noodles". However, none of the resources I consulted had an entry for the compound 爽滑 and only nciku had an example of its use: 它需要柠檬汁来让已变干的扁豆入口更加爽滑。"It needed lemon juice to sharpen the flatness of the dried lentils." The last part of the sentence literally translates as something like "make enter the mouth even more 爽滑".

So, at the end of the day, I'm still no wiser as to what 爽滑 is supposed to mean in this context. We seem to be dealing with a particular variety of noodle intended for a certain preparation, but what? Sounds like monshu is just going to take the easy way out and serve them in some miso broth. In the meantime, there's a Chinese-speaking coworker I can turn to for some guidance.

Unfinished business

Ten years ago today, I posted a select list of thirteen titles I'd begun reading and never finished. I went through it again today and realised that in the intervening decade I've whittled it down to...ten. (The three I went back and finished were Genji, Egil's saga, and One hundred years of solitude.) Several of the remaining titles I'd forgot I'd owned, since they're in a box in the library still waiting to be unpacked. I don't want to think how many more unfinished books have piled up in the meantime.

We're on the cusp of transition from summer to fall, so I'm finding it hard to settle on a new long read. I'm starting to feel the pull of East Asian lit again, but they could be just the mooncake talking. So in the meantime I've taken up Woodrell's Tomato red, whose sub-200 page count should please McEwan. I've also got short story books from Danticat, Jones, and an international anthology from Halpern. "Summer is for short stories," the clerk at Uncharted Books in Logan Square told me, and I think she was right.