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One of the first Pekingese colloquialisms I learned (by now I know scores) was taught to me half a century ago by Iris Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013), daughter of the distinguished linguist, Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982).  It sounded like "der", sometimes with a trill at the end, and meant "scram; skedaddle".  Like many authentic Pekingese colloquial expressions, it was impossible to tell for sure how to write it in Sinographs.

Recently, I asked around to see if people of a younger generation (in their 20s and early 30s) knew this expression, what it meant, how to write it, and how to pronounce it.  Most of my informants, even those who had grown up in Beijing / Peking, told me that they had never heard it.

Here are a couple of unexpected replies:

Jing Wen, a native of Beijing, doctorate in Egyptology

I agree with you and I am sure you mean the verb diānrle 颠儿了, which means “get out of here quickly” or “slip away”. Another saying with similar meaning is “sāyāzile 撒丫子了”. 

This verb is used in past (or perfect) tense and that is why it is usually diānrle 颠儿了 rather than diānr 颠儿. Sentences such as *wǒ míngtiān diānr 我明天颠儿 （wǒ míngtiān zǒu 我明天走 ["I'll go tomorrow"]）or  *nǐ diānr bu diānr 你颠儿不颠儿（nǐ zǒu bù zǒu 你走不走 ["are you leaving"]） do not exist. 

There is another phrase, pìdiān pìdiān 屁颠屁颠, to describe “jǐn zhuīzhe tǎohǎo rén, bājié rén de yàngzi 紧追着讨好人，巴结人的样子” ("chasing after others to please them"). Maybe it literally means “gēn zài biérén pìgu hòumiàn pǎo 跟在别人屁股后面跑” ("running behind another person's ass").

It is possible that diānr 颠儿 ("scram; skedaddle") is derived from diān 蹎 ("trip / fall forward: rush about"). In Shuōwén jiězì 说文解字 (Discussing writing and explaining characters [100-121 A.D.]), diān 蹎 means bá 跋 (“go by foot”).

VHM:  Here we seem to be entering běnzì 本字 ("original character") territory, for which see:

• • "Morphemes without Sinographs" (11/18/21)
  • "Kiss kiss / BER: Chinese photoshop victim" (7/22/14)

Zihan Guo, native of Jiangxi Province, expert on the aesthetics of taste in middle period Chinese poetry

Selected articles

• "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17) — the case in a nutshell
• "No character for the most frequent morpheme in Taiwanese" (12/10/13)
• "A Northeastern topolectal morpheme without a corresponding character" (6/9/20)
• "Taiwanese Morphemes in Search of Chinese Characters", by Robert L. Cheng (Zheng Liangwei), Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 6.2 (June, 1978), 306-314.  A classic article that deserves to be enshrined in the Sinological Hall of Fame, morphology-phonology chamber, like the Yale linguist, George A. Kennedy's memorable "The Butterfly Case" (in Wennti, 8 [March, 1955]), which was a followup to his even more famous piece called "The Monosyllabic Myth" (in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 71.3 [1951], 161-166), both of which are reprinted in Tien-yi Li, ed., Selected Works of George A. Kennedy (New Haven: Far Eastern Publications, 1964), respectively pp. 274-322 and pp. 104-118, merits inclusion in the othography-etymology chamber of the the Sinological Hall of Fame.  In these articles, Kennedy was writing about the fact that some Sinitic morphemes are disyllabic and how húdié 蝴蝶 ("butterfly") is a prime example.  The case is recounted in brief in J. Marshall Unger's Ideogram:  Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 7.
• "'Butterfly' words as a source of etymological confusion" (1/28/16)
• "GA" (8/6/17)
• "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
• "Ambling, shambling, rambling, wandering, wondering: the spirit of Master Zhuang / Chuang" (7/21/21)
• "Spelling with Chinese character(istic)s" (11/21/13)
• "Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12)
• "Is Mandarin easy to learn after all?" (5/29/19)
• "'Crisis = danger + opportunity' in America and in PRC official media" (4/21/20)
• "'Words / Characters of the Year' for 2013 in Taiwan and in China" (12/26/13)
• "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20) — with a bibliography of dozens of relevant posts
• "Sinitic languages without the Sinographic script" (3/5/19) — also with an enormous bibliography

• Douglas, Carstairs (1899) [1873]. Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy (2nd ed.). London: Presbyterian Church of England.

   Campbell, W. (1913). A Dictionary of the Amoy Vernacular. Tainan: Ho Tai Tong.

[Thanks to Xiuyuan Mi (nonnative Beijinger) and Diana Shuheng Zhang (native northeasterner), both of whom had never heard of this expression)]

January 1, 2022 @ 12:07 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Colloquial, Topolects, Writing systems

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