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Monday, February 21, 2011

無厘頭♂ and 他媽的♀

Starting in the 80s, 無厘頭 became commonly used in Cantonese to describe something bizarre and silly. A new genre of movie is now called 無厘頭, Shaolin Football falls into that category and so would Itchy& Scratchy and most cartoons. Because of its general acceptance, the correct meaning of these words is becoming obscure and most people think the expression is just another recently invented idiom. Actually, in grammatically correct Cantonese, it should be 無厘頭尻. If one fill in the omitted vulgar word for penis, 尻, these four words clearly means something that is so silly you can't tell its head from penis. The whole expression is a little bit like "head in ass" in English.  (無 is "no", 無厘 is a "lacking certain amount of", for example, you can say this post is 無厘正經, not very serious.)

of course Cantonese is not alone in being so reserved by omitting the foul words, The official national curse in Mandarin 他媽的 is also politely truncated and ended up as the famous 三字經, three word classic. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what the missing 4th word is. 他媽的, or "his mother's", is unmistakably missing the word 屄, or vagina. Actually the same curse in its entirely is still in daily use in the form of 娘那個屄 in the Shanghai dialect. (The first person pronoun and the verb are also omitted, I'm not going to insult your intelligence by spelling them out here.)

Similar in strength to the English word cunt, 屄 is pronounced bi (1st or 2nd sound) in Mandarin and hai (4th sound) in Cantonese (colloquially written as 西inside門 in Hong Kong)。This is not a a word you want to use in mixed company even your female friends are accustomed to F bombs or its Chinese counterpart, nothing makes women feel more inferior or self-conscious than genitalia and the C word is where they draw the line (it could be some sort of deep rooted Freudian penis envy if you want to get analytical about it). Most incredible, the usage of this extremely vulgar word has also been gentrified and seen a major revival recently. It's quite common to see people use the letter B in its place on the Internet and in verbal conversations. It is socially acceptable to say "我真傻B!" to exclaim how stupid one feels about himself. Literally, saying "I am a real stupid cunt!" for something minor like paying too much for a rice cooker.  Although this statement is implicitly correct by demonstrating the speaker's low intelligence, it's somewhat over-the-top and redundant in my opinion.

Cantonese is usually rich in this respect, I hope I don't come across as a Cantonese snob, but I do welcome the revival of these forbidden words. It's pretty cool to tell someone publicly he's dumb as a vagina or 傻B. Believe me, you can get away with it by keeping a straight face and looking innocent as a penis 戇居居(i.e. 戇尻尻).

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