I have elsewhere noted my love for the brief run of Joss Whedon's Western-styled sci-fi series Firefly, and recently learned of a handy reference page for show watchers. Whedon's universe had English as its major spoken language, but Mandarin Chinese also played a role in people's everyday speech. For the crew of the good ship Serenity and the shady characters they sometimes encountered, that role was most often profanity.
The good folk at Topless Robot have compiled the 15 best Chinese curses uttered during the show; the title of this post comes in at No. 5 (Caution: The Topless Robot people wield a free-range vocabulary). Apparently, for most of these, the episode writer would dream up a wacky phrase that they wanted to be used as a curse word, and then a woman who worked for the show and translated things to Mandarin so the actors could speak it properly would then render it into that language. So few Mandarin speakers who are not also fans of Firefly would understand why you suddenly tossed "Gao yang jong duh goo yang" into the conversation, unless you happened to be talking about cloned goats instead of naturally-conceived ones.
I might also note that the people who voted in the survey mentioned in yesterday's post did not see fit to include Firefly as one of those shows, so I can only conclude that each of them is a perfect bun tyen-shung duh ee-dway-ro.
(H/T Opuszine)
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