Some interesting words I’ve run across recently:
1) I was watching Jia Zhangke’s movie Ash Is Purest White, about a couple involved in the (pretty petty) underworld milieu of Datong, and was intrigued to note that the subtitles didn’t translate the word jianghu (e.g., “You’re no longer in the jianghu”). I paused the movie to look it up and discovered it’s such a complex concept the choice to leave it in Chinese made sense:
Jianghu (江湖; jiānghú; gong¹wu⁴; ‘rivers and lakes’) is a Chinese term that generally refers to the social environment in which many Chinese wuxia, xianxia, and gong’an stories are set. The term is used flexibly, and can be used to describe a fictionalized version of rural historical China (usually using loose influences from across the ~1000 BC–280 AD period); a setting of feuding martial arts clans and the people of that community; a secret and possibly criminal underworld; a general sense of the “mythic world” where fantastical stories happen; or some combination thereof.
See the Wikipedia article for the derivation from Zhuangzi and various interpretations and uses. The Chinese title of the movie is 江湖儿女 ‘Sons and Daughters of (the) Jianghu,’ which certainly gives the prospective viewer more of a heads-up than the mysterious English one.
2) I forget where I ran across the French word bistouri ‘scalpel,’ but it’s got an interesting history; Wiktionary:
Borrowed from Italian pistorese or pistorino (“from Pistoia”, see Latin Pistōrium); the city of Pistoia was once famous for the manufacturing of blades.
It was borrowed into English as bistoury /ˈbɪstəɹi/, of which the OED (entry from 1887) says “Surgery. A scalpel; made in three forms, the straight, the curved, and the probe-pointed (which is also curved).” The etymology, after deriving it from French, adds “Said in some books to be < Pistorium, now Pistoja; but this is merely a conjecture from the similarity of the words.” I hope Xerîb will have something to say.
3) In Alaina Demopoulos’s Grauniad thumbsucker “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public? Why the internet hates ‘performative reading’” (archived), I was baffled by the first noun in “And maybe there’s still some steeze that comes from flexing an ‘important’ book.” Turns out steez(e) (which has not made it into the OED) means ‘a person’s distinctive and attractive or impressive style of dress or way of doing things’; Green says [SE style + -ɪᴢ- infix] and takes it back to 1990 (Run-DMC ‘Bob Your Head’ 🎵 Weave with ease and please the steez with G’s). The ever-hip NY Times was onto it by 2007 (Anne Goodwin Sides, “Snowbound Neverland in Colorado“: “‘Right now I’m learning to pop off of jumps with steeze’ — style”), but it had somehow eluded me until now.
Heh. I just did a site search and discovered commenter Joe R wrote back in 2011 “Some examples of words I wish were in the dictionary: steez, swag, in the cut […].” So I had seen it, but not actually noticed it. I said, with lamentable hauteur, “But almost none of these words will be around, or even remembered, in ten years.” To which Joe R quite properly responded “Most of these words have already been around for ten years, and I suspect most of them will last a while yet.” And jamessal joined in: “Gotta side with Joe on this one, Hat. I was personally using steez, swag, in the cut, lacing, 5-O, baller, hooptie, shorty, and whip ten years ago, and they’re still current.” Mea culpa, guys!
Le Petit Robert (2017 edition) qualifies the derivation from Pistoia with “p.-ê.” (“perhaps”).
I’m familiar with the word “jianghu” and its meaning but could never think how you could explain it it in English. It’s a word with rich associations in Chinese. It essentially refers to potentially disreputable people outside the world of ordinary settled life. I wonder if it might be closest in feeling to the English word “drifter”…
So “Neverland” doubling up as “underworld”?
As Chinese fantasy media has become better known in the West, we’ve imported some of their tropes as full loanwords — jianghu might be the biggest one; dantian (丹田 dāntián) is another i encounter a lot. It’s as nativized (to the target audience of those subtitles) as “geas” or “mana”. I’m not into this scene much myself, just hearing about Cdramas and Chinese webnovel fandom secondhand, but I’m so used to these words that calquing 丹田 as “elixir field” or “energy center” is actually more confusing to me. I have no idea how you would calque “jianghu” — “mythic world” and “martial world” seem… vague and confusing. Trond Engen’s suggestions of “Neverland” and “underworld” might have the wrong connotations built in from their use in established Western genres (though i agree with him that they can be helpful for explaining it)
If people want to see more terms, here’s a glossary I consult a lot: https://immortalmountain.wordpress.com/glossary/wuxia-xianxia-xuanhuan-terms/
There are plenty of trope terms that get calqued, like “cultivation”. I particularly want to shout out “golden core” (金丹, Jīndān — I had to look up the pinyin for this comment because i never see it), which is a term I encounter as much as dantian. The neat thing here is that apparently the conventional translation changed in the past 10-15 years — previously 金丹 was more often translated as “golden elixir” or “azoth”. My friend speculates that the convention change may be related to the rise of “magical cores” as a trope in Harry Potter fanfiction! Fascinating example of internet cultural exchange if so. (Friend is working on an essay about this but its not published yet, I’m just getting teasers in the group chat lol.)
I don’t know or use the lexeme myself, but the 1990 and 2007 examples given of “steez(e)” don’t actually sound from context very much like the same word or at least not the same sense.
As Chinese fantasy media has become better known in the West, we’ve imported some of their tropes as full loanwords — jianghu might be the biggest one; dantian (丹田 dāntián) is another i encounter a lot.
Thanks for that, and for your whole very informative comment! I like knowing these things.
Some professors of plastic surgery at La Sapienza in Rome published a brief article about the word “bisturi” a few years back, suggesting that it might derive from scalpellum bistortum, a bloodletting tool. (“‘Bisturi, please’ said the surgeon to the scrub nurse,” by Fabio Santanelli di Pompeo et al., downloadable from the usual academic sites whose spam I will now have to unsubscribe from for the umpteenth time.) Skipping over the introduction and some digressions about Greek and Turkish:
In Cdrama subtitles, it’s not uncommon to find Jianghu translated as “pugilist world” or “martial world”, though I’ve encountered a very wide variety of renderings. 江湖人, jiānghú rén, literally “Jianghu person”, also gets a range of translations only partly overlapping with those of 江湖 itself, with terms like “wanderer” or “free spirit” being used sometimes. Not very apt, but you get used to these kinds of translations when you watch wuxia shows with subtitles. (I need the subtitles, but with their help usually catch enough of the original to know what terms are being used, which also helps.)
Actually, I sometimes like these amateurish fan subtitles, with their typos, highly conventionalized translations of key terms, and all, better than professional subtitles which are more polished but sometimes less informative. Some fan subtitles also add very helpful textual notes (I assume that’s what the TN is supposed to mean, anyway) explaining points of cultural context — like that a particular shot is meant to be reminiscent of a wedding photo, or that white butterflies represent the souls of the dead. In some cases, these can be a bit too lengthy to actually catch in their brief flash on the screen, but I appreciate their presence anyway, and there’s always the pause button.
Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a particularly good Cdrama, I highly recommend Nirvana in Fire (as it is, rather unfortunately, conventionally translated — this has nothing at all to do with the original title). It has plenty of the standard tropes, but the costuming and acting are so superb that even if you’re not totally reconciled to things like quasi-magical poisons that have a lot of very specific, plot-convenient effects, it carries itself along very well. The first episodes do throw you in a bit in medias res, but by the time you get about three episodes in it’s pretty clear who matters and what the main groups of actors are (and I have to suspect that anyone who reads a lot of Russian literature will be used to keeping track of a fairly large cast with varied relationships; for me, it was Norse sagas and The Silmarillion that had primed me for this sort of thing). Overall, it’s a really very fine piece of television.
Here’s the page on the main Asian drama website, and it seems to still be available through Amazon Prime: https://mydramalist.com/9025-nirvana-in-fire
And if anyone doesn’t want to commit to a 54-episode epic, I also recommend this movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assassin_(2015_film)
I have to admit that although I had probably heard of the term 江湖 jianghu, I couldn’t have told you how it was used in wuxia. But the concept of 武林 wulin (literally, “martial forest”) is apparently related, and this term will be familiar to most Korean speakers (as Sino-Korean 무림 murim) regardless of their familiarity with wuxia.
There are some other words used in Korean that seem to be borrowed from the vocabulary of wuxia, or at least the world of Chinese martial arts in general. 내공 naegong from 內功 neigong (“internal ability”) was probably popularized by wuxia. I was about to add 장풍 jangpung from *掌風 zhangfeng (“palm wind”), but I can’t actually find this term being used in Chinese (except in reference to a Korean video game).
Now I’m wondering where this term came from. I couldn’t find a simple term meaning “palm wind” in Chinese, only something about the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms (降龍十八掌).
“Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms”
These feature prominently in Jin Yong’s wuxia novel Legend of the Condor Heroes (another not-that-precise conventional translation). I’m under the impression he invented this martial arts technique, but I’m not totally sure.
Granted I am probably to old to be relevant, if not as old as LH (sorry), but on the whole I think LH had the best of the argument with Joe R. 14 years on and I still don’t see most of those words in wider usage. Personally I only understand “swag” “flossing”, “baller” and “bougie” as still current to a larger English speaking audience. I have never heard “steez” until today, nor has my wife, nor has my 17 year old son. I am sure all of Joe’s words are relevant to various subcultures somewhere, but does the OED have the responsibility for recording all slang and every neologism ever invented?
Alaina Demopolous is also no longer in her early 20s. I wonder if “steez” was current with her cohort but is no longer “groovy” to modern teenagers?
Faulkner, Nabokov, Franzen
One of these things is not like the others.
the rasorium was then differently named as scalpellum bistortum, from “bis” twice and “tortum” the Latin verb “torqueo” to curve/turn.
In which case “bistouri” would be a doublet of “bistort”, Persicaria bistorta, a plant with twisted roots? Also applied to some related plants.
One of these things is not like the others.
I had the same reaction.
Speaking of, Hat, I am not sure what you mean by “thumbsucker”. How would you yourself define it (in this context anyway)?
I wonder if the American fantasy novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_Birds (which I vaguely recall enjoying on balance although I haven’t reread it in the last four decades …) could be said to have something like a jianghu setting as a fair paraphrase of the “Ancient China That Never Was” from the blurb.
Um. In what way is a two-edged scalpel “twisted twice”?
Speaking of, Hat, I am not sure what you mean by “thumbsucker”. How would you yourself define it (in this context anyway)?
thumbsucker (US, slang) A piece of serious journalism that explains the background of current events and interprets them in a manner comforting to the intended readers.
Thanks. I saw that, but wasn’t sure if it really fit this context. That definition sounds too dignified for a “those youngs and their meems” fluff piece.
(I enjoyed it OK.)
Yeah, I was surprised to see “serious journalism” but I assume it means “appearing in an actual newspaper like the Graun rather than some trashy rag.” In any case, I use it to mean fluff pieces of any kind.
I feel like a thumbsucker has to have the byline of an op-ed columnist type and not be presented as a “straight news” story. And interpret events or trends or whatever in a fashion comforting to the pre-existing worldview of the writer as well as that/those of the intended readers. There’s a secondary implicature I think of superficial profundity even if the reality is fluff.
I may have overextended the term because I enjoy it so much.
An all-time favorite headline: “A Gasket Factory Worker Finds Her Job Routinely Satisfying” (Chicago Tribune, 1986). Happy Labor Day, I guess.
Labor Day, Shmabor Day. It’s the Byzantine (and thus pre-Petrine Russian) New Year! Be mindful to write 7534 rather than 7533 on your checks.
I think it’s important to remember that in Chinese Jianghu is not a monopoly of martial arts contexts. Jianghu was also used for something as simple as an itinerant medicine pedlar (although as a borrowing, it’s probably going to be used only in a martial arts setting in English).
I wanted to say something about how I translated jianghu in a movie script, but I’m restricted by an NDA. Look for the movie next February (in Mandarin)! Maybe some of my work will make it into the English subtitles.
Bathrobe, and I believe it’s also used of, for instance, someone operating a “Black Inn” (where they serve human flesh in steamed buns): part of why I think “wanderer” is a very inadequate translation!
I’ve also read that in non-fictional contexts, Jianghu is now even broader than that, with (for example) rock musicians often describing themselves as in the Jianghu. I feel like it sometimes verges on “counterculture”, though with rather different connotations.
“Look for the movie next February (in Mandarin)!”
Can you at least say what the movie is?
And/or can you give us a hint that would enable us to guess your translation? Don’t tease us!
I believe it’s also used of, for instance, someone operating a “Black Inn” (where they serve human flesh in steamed buns): part of why I think “wanderer” is a very inadequate translation!
You’re just proving my point. Your example is still pretty violent and wuxia, but jianghu isn’t necessarily tied to this kind of thing. Maybe it is in English nowadays, but not necessarily in Chinese (which was my point). Check out the Chinese Wikipedia page for an explanation: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B1%9F%E6%B9%96
https://www.screendaily.com/news/giddens-kos-big-budget-kung-fu-sets-holiday-opening-in-2026-exclusive/5202985.article
Sorry to tease you all.
I’ve also read that in non-fictional contexts, Jianghu is now even broader than that, with (for example) rock musicians often describing themselves as in the Jianghu. I feel like it sometimes verges on “counterculture”, though with rather different connotations.
I’ve had very little contact with this idea, but I’m wondering whether “outlaw world” would be a good translation.
“banū sāsān”?
“You’re just proving my point. Your example is still pretty violent and wuxia, but jianghu isn’t necessarily tied to this kind of thing.”
I wasn’t disagreeing with you in the slightest (as I hope my example of rock musicians made clear), just noting that being itinerant is not a particularly core element here.
I think it is actually one core element, if not the only one. Being outside the settled community and the laws of the settled state are both elements of the Jianghu, from what I can tell (as a non-consumer of wuxia works).
I’m slightly sceptical of Western elaborations on “Oriental” cultures. The Mongolian word for Venus is Сугар (Sugar), written Shugar-a (ᠱᠤᠭᠠᠷᠠ) in the traditional script. I once idly looked up “Shugara” on the internet, only to find it was the Japanese goddess of Death (look it up, it’s the first search result). Wow! Maybe there’s a connection! Wait a minute, how come I’ve never heard of this Japanese goddess? Sure enough, it was pure fabrication, as the second search result showed. All pure Orientalism. (Not to say that wuxia is all a Western fabrication, but the temptation to distort is there.)
It wasn’t the first hit for me, but I did see it. I also learned the word “egregore”, which I see our host has not overlooked.
Ok, this is the link, if anyone is interested:
https://vkjehannum.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/shugara/
And I couldn’t find the site debunking it. But that page maintained Shugara was also called Shagura in Japanese. And this page said Shagura was Japanese for autumn rain. Never heard the term. Maybe Shigure? 時雨. What a pile of crap.
https://vkjehannum.wordpress.com/tag/shagura/
Not saying that 武侠 is made up. It’s big time in China, and just as likely to be elaborated and romanticised in its own native cultural milieu. But when it finds its way into the hands of Western aficionados, all bets are off. It’s fantasy stuff.
Final comment on this:
Mongolian Shugar-a (ᠱᠤᠭᠠᠷᠠ) is from Sanskrit Śukra (शुक्र) “Venus”, meaning “clear, bright”.
Ok, this is the link, if anyone is interested:
https://vkjehannum.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/shugara/
“But when it finds its way into the hands of Western aficionados, all bets are off. It’s fantasy stuff.”
Very plausible, of course, but I wonder what you have in mind. I’m struggling to think of much Western literature or media claiming to be in the genre, though maybe I’m just blissfully unaware on this point. I suppose there are probably internet fora, or were when those were still a thing. But my sense is that wuxia tends to be known, at least in English, largely though the dissemination of Chinese language materials.
I have to say that I’m rather entertained by the derogatory use of “fantasy” in a context that’s pretty much just pure fantasy/romanticism from the get go!
Chinese people at least know the meaning of the word. Fantasy with knowledge. Most non-Chinese speakers don’t. Pure fantasy detached from any basic moorings. That’s the difference.
I don’t claim any special knowledge of Jianghu or Wuxia. I just know how I (on very few occasions) encountered the word in China, and my admittedly fuzzy understanding is backed up by Chinese Wikipedia. It wasn’t through Western wuxia subculture, anime subculture or any other filter.
PS: I’m still trying to puzzle out why I listed the same link twice. I think it’s due to using a phone to post here. It can be clumsy and confusing.
I think we’re approaching the same thing from two angles. I think Western subcultures are fairly irrelevant here… In terms of actual substance, I’d only repeat that, as an actual point of fact about Chinese literature, jianghu stuff does sometimes include non-itinerants, like the Black Inn operators I mentioned (in this case a trope predating modern commercial wuxia and going back at least to The Water Margin). It was on my mind, because I recently watched a show where jianghu ren was translated as “wanderer” despite this being singularly inapt in context (referring to someone running a casino/entertainment hall thing).
I suppose it does go to show how the connotations of wandering are fairly prototypical, but also that they’re not adequate. I don’t know what the native language of the amateur subtitlers was in this case — it can vary a lot.
I also hate trying to do, well, almost anything on my phone! I say as I post this on it…
I suppose it does go to show how the connotations of wandering are fairly prototypical, but also that they’re not adequate.
I agree with your summation. I think “drifter” (my original term) would be more appropriate in its connotations than “wanderer”, but only very marginally.
(Posting on a phone is also time-consuming, easy to mess up, and finicky to correct. As you can see, I’m now on my computer.)
I think the general connotation is that 江湖人 aren’t very reputable or trustworthy, perhaps somewhat (or very) lawless, not being subject to the constraints of settled people.