New favorite Chinese phrase
Friday, December 24th, 2021 10:49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.