Odoriferous Mandarin term for "copycat"

April 18, 2021 @ 10:16 pm · Filed by under Idioms, Insults, Lexicon and lexicography, Morphology, Words words words

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A gēnpìchóng 跟屁虫 (lit., "follow-fart-bug / worm") is somebody who tags along after someone else so as to smell his farts, i.e., someone who follows another person all the time, a copycat, a shadow, a flatterer, sycophant, boot / ass licker, kiss-ass, yes man.

And here's a cute little tutorial about how to be a gēnpìchóng:  

Some marketing genius came up with this bright orange gēnpìchóng 跟屁虫 flotation device that you tie to your behind so that you won't sink beneath the water if you can't swim.

There's a certain resonance, if not assonance, or at least reverberation, between gēnpìchóng and pāimǎpì 拍马屁 (lit., "pat horse's buttocks", i.e., "to brownnose; suck up to; kiss ass").

Our malodorous morpheme, pì 屁 ("fart"), is very productive in forming a wide variety of colorful lexemes:

Now I'm going to stick out my long nose with its deep nostrils (not my neck!) and point out:

From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *pja-n/t/s (“fart; shit”). Cognate with Tibetan ཕྱེན (phyen), འཕྱེན ('phyen, “flatulence”), Jingpho hpyet (“to fart”).

(source)

Old English feortan, ultimately from PIE *perd- (source also of Old High German ferzan, Old Norse freta, Danish fjerte, Sanskrit pard, Greek perdein, Lithuanian perdžiu, persti, Russian perdet), of imitative origin. Related: Farted; farting. As a noun, from late 14c.

(source)

Alas, there's no medial "r" in the ST words.

(Zhengzhang): /*pʰis/

Different enunciation?

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf, Julie Lee, and Shuheng Zhang]

April 18, 2021 @ 10:16 pm · Filed by under Idioms, Insults, Lexicon and lexicography, Morphology, Words words words


7 Comments

  1. Y said,

    April 18, 2021 @ 10:51 pm

    cf. Japanese 金魚の糞 kingyo no fun or 金魚のうんこ kingyo no unko 'goldfish poop', i.e. a persistent trailer.

  2. Andy Stow said,

    April 19, 2021 @ 10:32 am

    "The farter is usually the first to realize (and complain about the fart)."

    Whoever smelt it, dealt it.

  3. William Berry said,

    April 19, 2021 @ 12:10 pm

    @Andy Stow:

    “The first hen that cackles is the one that laid the egg.”

  4. Elizabeth in Astoria said,

    April 19, 2021 @ 12:23 pm

    I heard long ago there was a Chinese proverb that "everybody likes the smell of his own fart", however have not been able to find any such proverb in books on suyu, etc. Has anyone else heard of this?

  5. julie lee said,

    April 19, 2021 @ 1:05 pm

    VHM's breadth in Chinese is always impressive, extending comfortably from the sublime to the scatological.

    Here he reminds us how productive the Chinese word PI "fart" is. It's so much a part of ordinary Chinese conversation that one hardly thinks about it.

    I find it interesting that the English language expresses the same
    feelings of exasperation as the Chinese but with the words "shit", "fuck", and "ass", and not with the word "fart". I wonder how it is with other languages. Is "fart" as favored there as an insult as in Chinese?

  6. Stephen Hart said,

    April 19, 2021 @ 7:27 pm

    Elizabeth in Astoria said,
    I heard long ago there was a Chinese proverb that "everybody likes the smell of his own fart", however have not been able to find any such proverb in books on suyu, etc. Has anyone else heard of this?

    After reading Hemingway Didn’t Say That, I suspect every statement like "a Chinese proverb…" or anything in the form "[famous person] once said…"

    https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/354682-although-he-like-all-people-secretely-enjoyed-the-smell-of

  7. David C. said,

    April 19, 2021 @ 7:46 pm

    @Elizabeth in Astoria

    To ridicule someone who is willing to see past the imperfections or obvious faults of another person, one would say that in the former's eyes, the other person 放个屁都是香的 (even his farts smell good).

    This blog post suggests that the proverb that you are thinking of could be a Greek proverb.

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