I have come across this many times however I have always forgotten to ask about it. Today I saw it on the news once again.
I will often hear Taiwanese people describe some foods as being “very Q”, having a “Q feeling” or other descriptors all using this Q. They will also use the Roman letter Q in written texts and not a Chinese character.
Does anyone know what it means? Does it come from Taiwanese?
Q comes from the Taiwanese holo word khiū. MOE has ordered it to be written as zdic.net/z/aa/kx/296A8.htm, but that’s cause they are brain dead. The much more likely candidates are 䊆, 糗 or 䵕
link are provided for a character not accepted by this forum, since it is not yet unicode CJK ext-C or above compatible.
good muâ-tsî are not supposed to be rubbery… that sounds like it is been sitting out for a long time.
from the Hanji choices 䊆, 糗 and 䵕, they all describe rice or grain being made into powder form. It’s likely the word started out to describe muâ-tsî itself.
Al dente would fit under the khiū description, but the word describe a wide range of chewiness.
sorry to revisit this really old thread, but there was a NYT article about this phenomenon that got me thinking about it again.
I now believe that Q in Taigi originated from khiû (written as 虯 or 鬈), which is used to describe curly hair. Its meaning got extended to describe food with a chewing yet soft texture because of how curly hair is soft to touch but bounces back in a springy way.