The winter just knocked at the door and did not come in last week - two days after that the weather returns warm. But it seems the winter is officially here from today on, and the weather will continue to go down, or downer, until 2007.
Dr. Langer is an expert in the field of tissure engineering and drug delivery. The Langer’s seminar I attended today revoked me about the idea of this post.
What is the Chinese saying for expertise and what are the direct English tranlation for the Chinese saying?
In Chinese, when someone has some expertise in some area, we usually say “这人很牛”(”This guy is really a bull”). Some non-native Chinese speaker, like Cantonese or Hakkanese speakers cannot grasp the sprit of the statement. They will say,”What? Why he is a bull?”
Up till this moment I still have no idea why a people with expertise is a bull, maybe a bull is strong, maybe this is something related to the bull in the Wall Street. Anyway, this is only a saying to express your emotion besides your opinion about this guy. And since this saying is originally from Northern dialect, it is difficult for Southern people to understand this.
Besides this word 牛(pronouciation: New),there is usually a combination word, called 牛逼(pronouciation: New Bee). This is more like a slang compared with 牛 because the extra charactor,逼(pronouciation: Bee), used to be an indication of female genital. It was impolite to say somebody 牛逼. But time flies and this word has lost its original meaning and becomes an adjactive more like 牛er or 牛est.
Now we come to another word, cow. In Chinese, bull and cow are both 牛. Unfortunately or fortunately, cow happened to be of the same prononciation of another Chinese slang 靠(No physical meaning, just a way to express the feeling of surprise, anger, admiration, etc.) It also used to be a dirty word, like f*ck or sh*t. But as more and more people use this word everywhere, every time, its meaning has been bleached and losts its dirt.
I would like to sum up here with a pictured relationship:
