Language Log

Libin Zhang sent in the following photograph of a restaurant in Datong, Shanxi Province:

Commenting on Facebook about Ben Zimmer's Language Log post on the Iraqi "Paul is dead" buffet sign, Anne Erdmann shared this buffet sign from China:

From Ajam Media Collective's Facebook page, a surprising buffet sign at Erbil International Hotel in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan:

A Hong Kong friend of Jeff DeMarco posted this photograph on Facebook (it's probably from Beijing, but he's not sure about that):

Reader Janet sent in this photograph of a food stall in Taiwan (source):

Victor Steinbok sent in this photograph of a dim sum restaurant in Boston:

Hiroshi Kumamoto received this envelope, where someone tried to translate "Herr" into Japanese and went wrong:

In "Chinglish in English?", we examined the expression "no zuo no die" and came to the conclusion that, no matter what it might mean, it has not — as has been claimed by devotees of Chinglish — become a part of English vocabulary; it has not even become a part of English slang.

Someone posted this picture of a package of mushrooms (?) on Reddit:

Photograph of a sign in Taiwan from Jason Cox, whose friend posted it on Facebook:

Beginning around the end of April, there was a flurry of activity surrounding this Chinglish expression: "no zuo no die".

The big news was that this Chinglishism had supposedly entered the American vocabulary, witness this article:  "Chinese buzzword 'no zuo no die' enters Urban Dictionary", and there were scores of others, most of them giving essentially the same story, namely, that "no zuo no die" had won a place in the Urban Dictionary, a rather dubious distinction.

Perhaps the most widespread of all Chinglish expressions (it has become virtually a standard throughout China) is "slip carefully", with extensions such as "carefully slip and fall down", "please slip carefully", and so forth.

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Paul Obrecht called to my attention the fact that the phrase "choke a small chili", which is widely used on Chinese wholesaling websites (especially for jewellery and accessories), gets 1.5 million Google hits (it received 307,000 ghits when I checked at 6:16 p.m. Tuesday evening, but that's still a lot for such an unusual expression).