{"id":516696,"date":"2010-04-05T21:33:55","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T01:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2236"},"modified":"2010-04-05T21:33:55","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T01:33:55","slug":"fried-enema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/516696","title":{"rendered":"Fried enema"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Drew Mackie has <a href=\"http:\/\/kidicarus222.blogspot.com\/2010\/01\/fried-enema.html\">posted an item<\/a> about this not very appetizing-sounding Chinese dish on his personal blog.\u00a0 He writes:\u00a0 &#8220;A bit of searching has led me only to find out that this food is not, in fact, enema content that is fried, but I don&#8217;t know exactly what it is or how it might have gotten its name.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/FriedEnema1.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-2236\"><\/span><br \/>\nHere&#8217;s the unsavory-sounding dish in the context of the original menu:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/FriedEnema2.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Drew asked for help from Language Log.\u00a0\u00a0 Luckily this puzzle is particularly easy to solve.<\/p>\n<p>The Chinese name of the dish in question is <em>zh\u00e1 gu\u00e0nchang<\/em> \u70b8\u704c\u8178, which is a kind of sausage made of wheat flour stuffed into hog casings and fried.\u00a0 The last two characters, pronounced <em>gu\u00e0nch\u00e1ng<\/em>,\u00a0 also have a completely different meaning, viz., &#8220;enema&#8221; or &#8220;give an enema&#8221; (literally, &#8220;to irrigate the intestine&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>This is a good example of the spoken language being clearer than the written language &#8212; at least when one is relying on not-very-good machine translation.<\/p>\n<p>Google Translate <a href=\"http:\/\/translate.google.com\/translate_t?hl=&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;text=%E7%82%B8%E7%81%8C%E8%85%B8&amp;sl=zh-CN&amp;tl=en\">renders \u70b8\u704c\u8178 correctly as &#8220;fried sausage&#8221;<\/a>.\u00a0 Unfortunately, restaurants in China can no longer use that method to improve the lexicographical appeal of their English-language menus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Drew Mackie has posted an item about this not very appetizing-sounding Chinese dish on his personal blog.\u00a0 He writes:\u00a0 &#8220;A bit of searching has led me only to find out that this food is not, in fact, enema content that is fried, but I don&#8217;t know exactly what it is or how it might have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-516696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}