Salty pig's hand

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Tony Lin, "End of the Line for Subway Ad Against Sexual Harassment:  One year later, Guangzhou feminist group still hasn’t succeeded in putting up anti-harassment billboards" (Sixth Tone, 4/28/17) is about a group of Chinese women who have — unsuccessfully so far — tried to place a series of public service notices in the Guangzhou subway, alerting passengers to the need to oppose groping. It contains pictures of the would-be ads, including this one:

The large characters say:

yòuhuò fēi jièkǒu
tíngzhǐ xián zhūshǒu

诱惑非借口
停止咸猪手

temptation / enticement / allure / seduction / attraction is no excuse
stop groping

The key term, xián zhūshǒu 咸猪手 ("groper") is actually a borrowing from Cantonese haam4 zyu1 sau2 咸猪手 (lit., "salty pig's hand"; "sexual pervert [esp. one who gropes women in public]")

See "Grilled sexual harassment" (5/5/13) for extensive treatment of the orthography, etymology, and meaning of this odd term.

[h.t. Bruce Humes]



4 Comments

  1. Anonymous Coward said,

    May 4, 2017 @ 9:50 am

    Note that the sign is literary enough to sound natural both as Mandarin and as Cantonese.

  2. Rick said,

    May 5, 2017 @ 2:16 pm

    'Salty pig's hand' is fairly straightforward, if – as with common English usage – unfair to pigs.

    But what I'd really like to know is, what's with the cat?

  3. speedwell said,

    May 5, 2017 @ 5:41 pm

    What's with the cat? Well, what did Trump grab?

  4. Shelly Guo said,

    May 10, 2017 @ 3:06 am

    Well, as a Chinese living in Guangdong, i must say that the note"salty pig's hand"sounds more natural in Cantonese. In Mandrain, it sounds funny…The prevention of sexual harassment is a serious topic and should raise high attention. Not only should the so-called "anti-harassment billboards"should be placed to alert passengers to the need to oppose groping, but also the relative regulations should be carried out soon to alarm those "pig's hand".As i know, many girls in China failed to find a way to protest when they meet harassment, because they have few evidents to show and nowhere to make a complaint. There still have some ridiculous thoughts that a girl suffer from gropping in public just because she wears so sexy… if she wears more, the pig's hand won't set her as target.Well, the "cat" in the picture is to symoblize the person who fights against harassment. Actually, the "cat" symoblize the police too. Have you ever watched "Mr Black",the famous cartoon in China,in which the character "Mr Black " is a cat and he is the Sheriff.

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