Wednesday, 1 March 2023

You are referring to the Immense Tyrant Without Compare

Here's the problem with Mandarin: move an inch outside your speciality, and there is no guarantee that any of the words will mean anything to you. I had been speaking Chinese for twenty years, and was in town to give a lecture on medieval history, but the strange sigils describing arcane translation nightmares, like McFlurry and McNugget, might as well have been Martian.

...

'What's that thing called,' I began wearily, 'which is very big probably the biggest thing that you have, and there are two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, all in a sesame seed bun?'

'Ah,' said the bespectacled youth before me, 'you are referring to the Immense Tyrant Without Compare (ju wu ba).'

At last, a new use for the archaic term for a Bronze Age overlord, now recognised by twenty-first-century Chinese teenagers as the word for a Big Mac. 

J. Clements, The Emperor's feast (2021), 194-5

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