Magical Penis Wine
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Victor Steinbok reports:
This made the rounds on Reddit a few times. The screenshot of a 2019 Reddit thread popped up on my FB feed today. It might even come in white and red 😈
Source: NV Debao Winery Magical Penis Wine
This is not a Chinglish label. The three large English words at the top of the label are what the three Chinese characters actually say:
shén biān jiǔ
神鞭酒
The first character means "divine; magic(al); spiritual; numinous".
The second character means "whip" or "penis of an animal; pizzle" — in this case it means "penis".
The third character means "alcohol, liquor; brew; wine".
There's also a:
sān biān jiǔ
三鞭酒
(traditional Chinese medicine) “three penis liquor”, a brown-yellow alcoholic beverage made from three kinds of animal penis and used in traditional Chinese medicine to “enhance health”
(source)
So far as I know, the most popular shén biān jiǔ 神鞭酒 ("divinely [efficacious] penis wine) is:
géjiè shén biān jiǔ
蛤蚧神鞭酒
"divinely [efficacious] gecko penis wine"
For an encyclopedia article (in Chinese) on this product, see here.
Shén biān jiǔ 神鞭酒 ("divinely [efficacious] penis wine) is listed in the most renowned traditional Chinese pharmacopeias.
On the problematic nature of the translation of the graph jiǔ 酒 as "wine", see the last three items in the "Selected readings".
Selected readings
- "Another early polysyllabic Sinitic word" (9/21/21) — gecko
- "Goblet word" (5/30/20)
- "English 'wine, French 'vin', Spanish 'vino'" (8/6/16) — this and the following two posts contain important notes on beer and the vessels for making, storing, and drinking it, including comparisons with similar vessels in the Middle East
- "Let the Beer-Divider Be Chief!" (8/5/09)
- "Don't Drive in the What, er?" (8/4/09)
Vanya said,
September 23, 2021 @ 2:07 pm
I remember “Three penis wine” as a running joke on the TV show “The League”. Didn’t realize it was an actual thing.
Anonymous said,
September 24, 2021 @ 7:09 am
It appears that in Japanese 三鞭酒 was formerly used as ateji for the word "champagne" (シャンパン "shanpan" and other phonetic variations), and dictionaries still list this, although like a lot of ateji its usage is nowadays rare.
This site lists some quotes from famous writers, mostly from the first half of the 20th century that use this spelling: https://furigana.info/w/%E4%B8%89%E9%9E%AD%E9%85%92:%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%91%E3%83%B3.
The Japanese Wikipedia article on champagne claims this ateji derives from "Hong Kong and Shanghai" but gives no source for this. It also gives another ateji 三変酒, which from a Google search seems very rare but is found (as 三變酒 glossed シャンペイン "shanpein") in the source given, Nakamura Masanao's 1871 translation of Samuel Smiles' Self-Help (which uses the imaginative title 西國立志編, roughly "western countries establishing intention/will compilation" while the modern rendition is a more literal 自助論 "self help essay/discourse").
The Mandarin word for champagne is 香檳酒 xiāngbīnjiǔ which sacrifices phonetic similarity for a semantic hint, 香 meaning "fragrant" and 檳 from the polysyllabic word 檳榔 "betel" which Dr. Mair has written about previously: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=51079. In the Mandarin word the character 酒 "alcohol" is read with its usual value, while in the Japanese word it is silent (perhaps it could be called a determinative).
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 24, 2021 @ 7:48 am
If I'd been Mao, I'd've made the right half of "蚧" the simplified character for penis. Why doesn't anybody consult me about these things?