A Chinese pun

Eating gow choy, better than one gow choy

A joke my mother used to chuckle over came back to me. In the story a young lady is asked to prove her cooking skills by making ten dishes. So she took some Chinese chives and fried them with an egg satisfying the condition. Chinese chives are called gow choy 韭菜 which is a homophone for 九菜 nine vegetables.

You are most likely to find 韭菜 at yum cha as gow choy go, fried cake with small shrimp and radish.

Dead man's head

Today I was reminded of a swear phrase in Cantonese. The most literal usage I heard of it was when Malaysia first printed its own paper currency, bearing the image of a late Agong, instead of one of QEII, as Malaya used to be a British colony. A person seeing this paper money for the first time complained: say yan tau (dead man's head) money! I think he didn't like the design or something, but I forget.

As a swear phrase it's only moderate, used to express disfavour or unhappiness with some thing or situation. It's mentioned in this collection.

Chance to win 2000 DMHs

thambi

I was reminded of this word when I read a kiasu joke. In my childhood it was a generic term for a young Tamil man, as in:

The kopitiam thambi will bring over your coffee

It occurred to me to look it up today, and it means little brother. I suspect it's no longer correct to use. However I think bang, short for the Malay abang, brother, is ok. Sort of like bro in English.

No thambis here, serve yourself

Word of the day: etiolated

I remember well what this word means. It describes plants that grow in insufficient light so look blanched and have elongated stems. It was introduced in my high school Agricultural Science class. As soon as I heard it I joked: Like David!

Everybody else in the class understood what I meant and laughed. The unfortunate target of my joke was a classmate who was somewhat pale and spindly. He transferred to another school later, nothing to do with my joke, nor was he bullied. I wonder what became of him and if he remembers this moniker. I'm sure he's bulked out like all the rest of us. 🙁

Etiolated boy

Two words for we in Malay

Malay is a relatively easy language to learn. For example there is no conjugation or indication of number for verbs. However Malay has a feature that English doesn't. Malay has two pronouns for we, kami and kita. Simply put kami does not include the listener, whereas kita does. So where English would use the same pronoun we for these sentences:

Thanks, we had a great bushwalk.

We must take better care of our environment.

Malay would use kami for the first and kita for the second.

I feel that this is a lacuna in English. If there were two forms of we, pollies would have to openly prevaricate in sentences like this:

We will all benefit substantially from this tax cut.

😉

If I may briefly mention a few things…

First Day Covers

Remember these? I was reminded by one in my collection of paper mail that was sent to me 48 years ago. In those days FDCs commemorated special days and were collector's items. Some aficionados went to the trouble of getting them at the post office on the first day of issue to gift to friends.

It was sent to me by a friend who was the younger brother of a boss I worked for after school. He may have been a colleague, I can't remember. Obviously he was keen on FDCs and was kind enough to send me one. I wonder what's become of him. I hope he had a good life.

Sugar people

He liked word jokes

A joke a friend of mine made came back to me today. A couple of university friends, one on a break from studying in NZ, and I, were discussing what to do over the Chinese New Year break. We were considering taking a ferry to Pangkor Island, off the coast of Perak, to stay in a beach chalet. Talking about the holidays, the NZ friend invented the phrase sugar people.

We knew exactly what he was joking about. Chinese sometimes call themselves Tang people, 唐人, because that period of Chinese civilisation was a glorious era. However the character for Tang, with the radical for rice added to the left, becomes the character for sugar, 糖. The characters are homophones and context disambiguates. You'll usually hear the Cantonese phrase tong yan, and it doesn't mean sugar people.

The other incident I remember is on the return trip on the ferry, we observed one of the passengers conspicuously taking great pleasure smoking a cheroot. Annual Chinese New Year cigar, quipped my friend, the implication being that it was a once-per-year treat.

My friend's somewhere around, possibly in Singapore. I miss his quirky sense of humour.

While writing this I discovered that sugar people are in fact a thing. They are figurines made from melted sugar. I never saw them in Malaysia though. Sugar was for tea or coffee, and sugar objects would have attracted ants.

Sugar people dining out