Fake F*ck

April 26, 2023 @ 8:36 am · Filed by under Borrowing, False friends, Slang

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Usual LL romanization, transcription, and translation of the Chinese text:

fǎkè

zānghuà

"fuck" de Zhōng yìyīn jiùshì: fǎkè. Yìsi wèi: xìngjiāo

zhù: zài Yīngguó huò Měiguó dú "fǎkèyóu"  Yīnwèi zhè shì zānghuà, qǐng dàjiā jǐnliàng shǎo shuō!

Zhōngwén míng    fǎkè

wàiwén míng    Fuck

láiyuán    Yīngyǔ

fēnlèi    zānghuà

guānlián     related to sex

法克
脏话
的中译音就是： 法克。意思为： 性交
注：在英国或美国读法克油 因为这是脏话，请大家尽量少说！

中文名  法克
外文名
来源  英语
分类  脏话
关联  与性相关

fǎkè

obsc.

The Chinese phonetic transcription of "fuck" is "fǎkè".  Meaning:  sexual intercourse.

Note:  pronounced "fuck you" in England or America.  Because this is an obscenity, please say it as seldom as possible!

Chinese term:    fǎkè

foreign term:    Fuck

orig.:    English

class.:    obscenity

assoc.:     related to sex

fǎkè yóu

法克鱿

lit., "law-overcome/subdue squid"

Lots of false friends floating around.

 

Selected readings

[h.t. Geoff Wade]

April 26, 2023 @ 8:36 am · Filed by under Borrowing, False friends, Slang


15 Comments

  1. Chris Button said,

    April 26, 2023 @ 9:05 am

    Following on from the discussion of 姏 and bubble tea a few posts back, the character 灋 (法) here is another interesting example of the use of phonetics in character composition.

  2. Paul Frank said,

    April 26, 2023 @ 10:52 am

    I presume that 法克 has a small number of the meanings and uses of 操 (sometimes written 肏), and a far smaller number than "fuck." A couple of minutes ago, I started counting, and lost count, of the number of acceptations of the noun, verb, adjective, and interjection "fuck" listed in the OED. "Fuck" is not quite as rich and complex a word as "do," but it's up there.

  3. Taylor, Philip said,

    April 26, 2023 @ 11:51 am

    "[The F word] is not quite as rich and complex a word as "do," but it's up there" — (some of) the many possible interpretations of "do" came up yesterday evening, when I was explaining to a friend and colleague a (TeX) program for converting classical Greek encoded using Sylvio Levy's transliteration scheme (developed during the late 1980s) into Unicode. I explained to him that the TeX macro "\do", in this particular context, would take a Unicode Greek glyph and expand it into its canonical Unicode name (e.g., "η" would expand into "GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA", the idea being that one could subsequently append (for example) "WITH PSILI AND VARIA AND YPOGEGRAMMENI", on which one could then perform a reverse lookup to obtain the glyph "ᾒ").

    I then showed him another definition of "\do" in a closely related program which "did" something quite different (it inserted an image if the image could be found, and otherwise inserted the name of the missing image). He quite reasonably asked "So why are they both called '\do' ?", and I explained that it saved me from having to think of a longer and more meaningful name, and thereby saved development time at the probable expense of maintainability.

  4. Anthony said,

    April 26, 2023 @ 5:58 pm

    Speaking of richness and complexity, I long time ago I read that the longest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary was for the word "set." That may or may not be (or have been) true. I wonder what the next longest entry is.

  5. martin schwartz said,

    April 26, 2023 @ 11:11 pm

    Probably way past 3 decades ago I was impressed by the entry "fuck" in some grand academic English-Chinese dictionary, published
    (I think) in Beijing; the entry had "fuckin' A" and "fuck a duck".
    I don't recall if it dealt with the minimal pair vb. "fuck óff!" vs.
    noun "fúck-off". It well may have.

  6. Chris Button said,

    April 27, 2023 @ 8:52 am

    I always thought the “a” in “fuckin’ a” was Canadian as in “fuckin’ eh” (which was where I was first exposed to it), but then I realized it was used in America too. Or was it borrowed?

  7. Rodger C said,

    April 27, 2023 @ 9:10 am

    "WITH PSILI AND VARIA AND YPOGEGRAMMENI"

    Gee, what ever happened to smooth, grave and subscript? Shouldn't a phrase beginning with WITH continue in English? Just saying.

  8. Taylor, Philip said,

    April 27, 2023 @ 9:55 am

    A fair point, Roger, but (a) "WITH ACUTE" (as opposed to "WITH GRAVE") would not be sufficient to differentiate between "WITH OXIA" and "WITH TONOS" (the glyphs may differ, even though Unicode normalisation rules would lead to them being unified — a serious error, IMHO), and (b) what would you have the Unicode standard call "LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH OGONEK" — "LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TURNED CEDILLA" — even CEDILLA is not English (< Spanish cedilla = Italian zediglia, on Latin type *zēticula, diminutive of zēta the letter z)!

  9. RfP said,

    April 27, 2023 @ 8:17 pm

    “Fuckin’ A” seems to be American, from the 1940s, and first used in the military. A quick internet search yielded in-depth information from several sources, including https://www.straightdope.com/21343214/what-s-the-origin-of-fuckin-a and https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/11/why-there-s-an-a-in-fucking-a.html.

    I first heard it in a San Francisco–area high school ca. 1968.

  10. Victor Mair said,

    April 28, 2023 @ 5:53 am

    I have always instinctively felt, from the contexts of its usage, that "fuckin' A" meant "fuckin' ay(e)", with the "A" standing in for "ay(e), as in "ay(e) mate", i.e,. "right; true; correct", and mostly in slang military parlance.

  11. Chas Belov said,

    April 29, 2023 @ 1:40 am

    @Anthony: I would guess that "run" would likely give "set" a run for its money on the most OED entries.

    This post is probably as on-topic a place as any to note that a Taiwanese indie rock group that I listen to changed its name in 2020, according to Wikipedia due to a trademark dispute. Sodagreen (蘇打綠) (literally, soda green) dropped the radicals from its Chinese name and the leading consonants from its English name, becoming Oaeen (魚丁糸) (literally, fish nail spool).

  12. Chas Belov said,

    April 29, 2023 @ 1:52 am

    Hmmm, looks like I clicked send too soon.

    蘇打綠 is pronounced sū​dálǜ
    while
    魚丁糸 is pronounced
    yúdīngmì

    So more like subsegmenting the original name rather than simply dropping the radicals.

    Also, the translations on Wikipedia differ from the MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary, and my Chinese is not good enough to know whether either or both are right.

  13. Chas Belov said,

    April 29, 2023 @ 1:56 am

    And I always thought the a in "fuckin' a" referred to the anus, although obviously with a less polite word being represented by the "a".

  14. Taylor, Philip said,

    April 29, 2023 @ 3:46 am

    I have never encountered the expression "Effin' A" anywhere but here, but on encountering it here I immediately assumed that it was a contraction of "Effin' arsehole", intended as a term of abuse.

  15. Stephen said,

    May 2, 2023 @ 6:48 am

    @Taylor, Philip

    I have never heard it 'in the wild' either.

    I am pretty sure that it is an American (originally military?) expression. The first time I came across it was probably in the mid-80s. Having seen the film The Right Stuff I read Tom Wolfe's book about the early days of the US manned space program, and a number of US military people are quoted as using it.

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