New favorite Chinese phrase

[cashew]

魑魅魍魉 [chī mèi wǎng liǎng]

Meaning: all the ghosties and ghoulies; or evil spirits of all stripes; or all the monsters and devils; or all the bad stuff.

I love how each character has the 鬼 radical. (Which means ghost/ghoul/monster.) Heeeee... Chinese characters are funny. What I like is that I can literally never have seen the character before in my life, but I will still know what the character means by simply following the character structure and reading the radicals.

Like: 又双叒叕 [yòu shuāng ruò zhuó]

The radical 又 means "again". So 又双叒叕 means "again and again and again...", aka déjà vu.

Sometimes I just have to share the really ridiculous moments in the Chinese language. Also, one of these phrases was invented in 800BCE while the other one came about in post-2010s. Guess which one's which.

Comments

[tanithryudo]

And then on a completely unrelated tangent, I found this screencap on the douban forums lately and thought you might find it amusing:

[cashew]

ROFLMAO

I love it. (Also, /(ㄒoㄒ)/~~ why must Chinese NT be so shitty? It's to the point where the Chinese NT is used as an insult by the fanbase to describe how teams are playing poorly, e.g. "Barça is the Chinese NT of European club football". XD)