11 April 2010

"Fried enema" explained

"The Chinese name of the dish in question is zhá guànchang 炸灌腸, which is a kind of sausage made of wheat flour stuffed into hog casings and fried.  The last two characters, pronounced guàncháng,  also have a completely different meaning, viz., "enema" or "give an enema" (literally, "to irrigate the intestine").

This is a good example of the spoken language being clearer than the written language — at least when one is relying on not-very-good machine translation."

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