窳 – Yu3 – Useless
Useless thing of the day: A website for a business that has the hours of operation…. WRONG! It would be better not to post them at all if you aren’t feeling up to the task of keeping them up to date.
By the way, 窳 is apparently either an old or unusual word that means “Useless”. The more normal way to say it would be 沒用 – Mei2 Yong4 or 無用 – Wu2 Yong4, both of which mean “Without Use”. So I guess even 窳 is pretty 窳.
軌 – Gui3 – Rail, Track
軌道 – Gui3 Dao4 – Track Path — Orbit
What’s this? Trains and spacecraft both travel on tracks? I wonder if this has anything to do with Astrotrain?
炎 – Yan2 – Inflammation, Infection, -itis
喉炎 – Hou2 Yan2 – Throat Inflammation — Laryngitis
跑 – Pao3 – Run
賽跑 – Sai4 Pao3 – Competition Run — Race
Two of my friends ran in the Manchester Road Race this year. I did it about 10 years ago so I figure that means I’m all set for life.
缺 – Que1 – Lack, Scarce, Run Short
缺席 – Que1 Xi2 – Lack Seat — Absent
織 – Zhi1 – Weave, Knit
編織 – Bian1 Zhi1 – Knit
赦 – She4 – Pardon
Marshmallow narrowly avoids the death penalty.
瓊 – Qiong2 – Fine Jade, Excellent
瓊脂 – Qiong2 Zhi1 – Jade Flat — Agar Agar
Welcome to Agar Agar day! It’s Agar Agar, the algae extract so nice they named it twice! Agar Agar, which has many uses: Stablizing and coagulating, can be widely used in producing drink,icecream,sugar,canned food,meat products etc, as coagulant, densifying agent,emulsifyingagent,keeping fresh agent, stabilizing agent ,floation agent! Agar Agar, primary ingredient in many octopus-themed desserts!
廠 – Chang3 – Cliff, Factory
Finally saw the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not good. Needed more Walken.
at the bottom of the tower
骯 – Ang1 – Filthy
骯髒 – Ang1 Zang1 – Filthy Dirty — Filthy
I never noticed how dirty of a word 髒 is. It’s made up of 骨 – Gu3 – Bones and 葬 – Zang4 – Bury. 骯 has bones in it too.
貓 – Mao1 – Cat
貓王 – Mao1 Wang2 – Cat King — Elvis
That’s right, Cat King. For dinner tonight Jenny made us ELVIS SANDWICHES: Bread. Lots of butter. Bananas. Peanut butter. Honey. BACON. Stack it all up, and FRY IT. Yes!
鑽 – Zuan1 – Drill, Bore, Probe
My dental hygenist wants me to be able to experience the pleasant sensation of a professional dental cleaning any time I want in my own home, so she gave me my VERY OWN DENTAL PROBE! How thoughtful!
巾 – Jin1 – Towel
餐巾 – Can1 Jin1 – Meal Towel — Napkin
Meal towel! I like it! It sounds like you’re a really messy eater.
I don’t get Google Base at all. From the announcement: “This beta version of Google Base is another small step toward our goal, creating an online database of easily searchable, structured information.”
Isn’t that just the web, minus the structured part?
Isn’t the whole genius of the web the realization that the structure isn’t necessary?
And isn’t the very reason for Google’s riches the fact that they figured out how to do the “easily searchable” part without the structure? That they figured out that even when a billion people who are definitely not interested in tagging or categorizing or structuring anything just start cobbling together half-broken HTML pages on whatever topics they like that it SELF ORGANIZES?
Google Base just feels like a throwback to the earliest thinking about online systems, like Xanadu or Cyc or CompuServe or something. Or maybe the semantic web people have infected Google and all is lost.
陪 – Pei2 – Accompany
陪審團 – Pei2 Shen3 Tuan2 – Accompany Investigation Group — Jury
琴 – Qin2 – Zither
口琴 – Kou3 Qin2 – Mouth Zither
Just the other day Jenny and I were talking about how insane the comments on the two mario music posts have become. In fact, Jenny is near the breaking point. I was telling her how a while ago it passed from the merely absurd to the truly surreal as the progression of requested instruments becomes more and more ridiculous. I said “So what’s next, ‘I need this music for harmonica!!! please email me back!!!!’?”
And then today there’s this:
MADDIE:I NEED THE HARMONICA TAB MUSIC FOR THIS
It’s really the all caps that makes it PERFECT.
晶 – Jing1 – Crystal
Are you ready for the Five Friendlies? And even though they were just revealed yesterday, Wikipedia already has an article.
辰 – Chen2 – Period, Time
Finally 小時 – Xiao3 Shi2 – Small Hour – Hour makes sense! It’s because the actual unit, 時辰 – Shi2 Chen2 – Hour Period was (not in use any more) two hours long. So one hour is just a “small hour”. See Wikipedia for the entire table of obsolete units of Chinese time.
泉 – Quan2 – Fountain, Spring
噴泉 – Pen1 Quan2 – Spray Fountain — Fountain
特 – Te4 – Special, Unusual, Extraordinary
特別 – Te4 Bie2 – Unusual Difference — Special
特點 – Te4 Dian3 – Unusual Point — Feature
I’ve added some new feaures to the dictionary while you weren’t looking. The ★’s represent the relative frequency of the words in Chinese text, so that when you look up rug and see that there are three ways to say it, you can immediately figure out which one is the most common. Also, right next to the link to 中文.com, there is a link to that word’s entry in Word of the Day, if it ever was one, so you can see what brilliant and inspring things I had to say about that particular character.
兼 – Jian1 – Double, Twice, Simultaneous
Got Gradius V! It’s great! And it has “helping”!
紲 – Xie4 – Leash
Unleashed: Jenny contends that it was fine, I contend that it just wasn’t that good. I will however agree with video store guy’s synopsis: “Jet Li’s best English language film”.
爽 – Shuang3 – Clear, Open, Refreshing
Another Chinese flavor: 爽口 – Shuang3 Kou3 – Refreshing Mouth — Fresh, Refreshing. We had some sort of Malaysian wild vegetable that had this flavor today at Szechuan Delight.
變 – Bian4 – Change, Alter, Transform
Today I’m searching for Chinese magic words. I’m not having much luck! What I mean is words like “abracadabra”, “hocus pocus”, or “presto” — sort of generic magic words. The closest I have come so far is this reference to 變 as a translation of Abracadabra.
Even Jenny doesn’t know any. She did mention that even in Chinese you still can say 芝麻開門 – Zhi1 Ma5 Kai1 Men2 – Sesame Seed Open Door — Open Sesame, which is cute.
I took a bunch of pictures at Sleeping Giant today, but you’ll never see them unless you rummage through the archives of the Mobile section. There really should be a “today’s pictures” thing or something. But until then, here they are:
蝙 – Bian1 – Bat
After seeing Batman Beyond I have concluded that the obvious joke “Batman Beyond? Yeah more like Batman B MINUS!” doesn’t quite go far enough.
Surprising possible future of the day: A world populated by infinitely intelligent AIs, with a crippling flaw: they only know things you can learn by looking at public domain works!
Prompted by two things. First, this quote by a Googler on Google Print:
We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.
Then, this blog post today by Google:
The world’s libraries are a tremendous source of knowledge, much of which has never been available online. One of our goals for Google Print is to change that, and today we’ve taken an exciting step toward meeting it: making available a number of public domain books that were never subject to copyright or whose copyright has expired. We can show every page because these books are in the public domain.
床 – Chuang2 – Bed
床 is also listed as meaning “Couch” in my dictionary but Jenny quite emphatically insists that this is wrong. But you can say 沙發 – Sha1 Fa1 – Sofa.
英 – Ying1 – English, Brave
Amazing I haven’t done this one yet!
英國 – Ying1 Guo2 – English Country — England
英文 – Ying1 Wen2 – English Language — English
And here, amazingly, is your Chinese/English guide to British Food! Never be caught not knowing how to say “Kidney Pie” in Chinese again.
