After this evening’s Forumosa gathering, I was walking near the buxiban zone south of the train station on my way to the MRT. I noticed a sign for a “K-shu” (cubicle place for study).
“K” is also used for “hit” and other such words.
Does anyone know where these usages came from, and why people here use the letter K? Borrowed from boxing (TKO, KO)? (But if so, how did this become so popular here given that boxing isn’t followed closely in Taiwan by many people?)
My wife told me that the term has been common for more than a decade.
More letters: BBC - ‘bee bee call’ for pagers. Remember those things? People would say ‘bee bee call’, and write ‘BBC’ on their name cards.
LKK - from Taiwanese ‘lao ko ko’ meaning crazy. Do people still say that now though? It was a popular slang a few years ago.
V8 - for video camera.
Ac_dropout, I am mystified by your post. If you read Cranky’s post you will see that he already knows what K-shu means. DOH!! He wants to know why ‘K’ is used. Also, I find it pretty hard to believe you don’t know what WC stands for.
[quote=“ironlady”][quote=“Spack”]LKK - from Taiwanese ‘lao ko ko’ meaning crazy. Do people still say that now though? It was a popular slang a few years ago.
[/quote]
I thought “lao ko ko” LKK meant an old person who was pretty much out in left field or behind the times, not a crazy person…?[/quote]
irnolady is right.
then what does SPP mean, exactly, Shiang piao piao? why?
Yes, seems K-SHU comes from Kan Shu, read books.
Why does VS (versus) mean “and” here in Taiwan and not versus?
I remember reading an article a few years that said the ‘K’ in K-shu was a dialect word (from Shandonghua I think) pronounced ‘kei’ and that ‘K’ was used because there was no official character to write it with. ‘Kei’ means to chop or cut hard. The A in A-cai or the ‘Q’ in Q-Q-de are similar. These are not English words but a convenient way to write Taiwanese sounds for which there are no accepted characters.
SPP! Forgot about that one. It’s ‘song byah byah’. You must have heard of Taiwanese ‘song’ - nerdy, geeky, uncool - can’t quite find the right equivalent English word. The ‘byah byah’ bit doesn’t really mean anything.
Maybe Ironlady can tell us more.
Uh-uh, 886 = “byebye la” (ba ba liu). 881 = “byebye” (ba ba yi)
My nifty little Instant Dict e-dictionary has an e-book full of those sort of slang “codes”, number and letter ones included. It’s even got some interesting straight-out slang. Like for example, apparently a hot girl with long hair is referred to as “hen an wu”, from the Chinese reading of the family name of Japanese pop singer AMURO Namie.
[quote=“Spack”]Where does NG for ‘outtake’ or ‘blooper’ come from? The only thing I can think of is ‘no good’.[/quote]That is it exactly. But of course no English speaking countries use that term.
Big Fluffy, I think the NG thing here comes directly from Japanese TV shows, where they have been using the NG for “bad take” (no good) for years. But you are right, English-speaking countries never use it. It’s Japlish again, just like CF for commerical film, or a TV commerical and even CM for commercial. Some Taiwanese ad companies and TV writers also refer to TV ads as CFs or CMs here. It’s a Japaneseism from the Land of Funny Englishy!
K, as “hit”, is a real Chinese character: kei1, written 克 with a knife radical inside it. (Sorry, my Chinese input doesn’t have this character.) Your dictionary may have it; my Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary has it listed on p. 390 as “beat or scold”.
Now one small quibble: I would say that ‘kei1’ is a real Chinese word rather than a Chinese character. This word is written as ‘K’ or with the character you mentioned. Otherwise we slide into the logographic fallacy quickly.
DM meaning ‘brochure’ must be another Japanese usage that has made its way into Taiwanese Mandarin. Anyone know?
DM is ‘direct marketing’ used in a much wider sense for any kind of leaflet or info sheet.
TV shows use ‘VCR’ to mean ‘video segment’.
They also used to use ‘MTV’ to mean ‘music video’ but now it seems more people are directly using the English term instead.
