What the devil are you saying?
The locals go to great lengths to dissuade Westerners from learning Cantonese, but Cecilie Gamst Berg refuses to fall for the old "it's too difficult for you" ruse
''Chok!" ; " Hou heh ah"; " Hou cheu ah" *
By the time you read this, these words and expressions may well be obsolete. The Cantonese language changes faster than you can say "Hot Chok! olate" and new buzzwords appear and become hopelessly dated in the time it takes to gobble down a bowl of instant noodles, or gong tsai min ("doll noodles", probably named after the first company to manufacture them).
In fact, an awful lot of Cantonese slang seems to revolve around food; like jyu pat ("pork cutlet": a fat, ugly girl), sek yuhn faan ("eat soft rice": live off the earnings of a prostitute), mou mai juk ("riceless congee": a plan going nowhere), hahm choy ("salty vegetables": crumpled clothes) and ha cheun fan ("shrimp egg powder": low-grade heroin).
Although I won't mention them in a family magazine, that most revered of objects, the penis, has more nicknames in Cantonese than Australians have words for being drunk. And talking of unmentionables, here is a typical example of how Cantonese evolves: because rude characters couldn't be written out in newspapers or in film subtitles, Chinese writers started using the letter X where the offensive character should have been. So they'd write " Hou X wat dat", for instance, which is as clean as saying "damned disgusting". Cantonese being what it is, though, people soon took to saying "X" (pronounced "ekk-see") as a euphemism for a swearword, and now ekk-see has become a swearword in its own right, one frowned upon by office ladies.
The younger set, I've been told, have long since moved away from X - and are now using the letter Q.
Their constantly evolving and highly descriptive slang and jargon are a matter of pride for the majority of Hong Kong people, who nevertheless display a strange schizophrenia when it comes to their local language. On the one hand they boast about Cantonese being the most difficult language in the world and the one with the fastest-changing slang; on the other they go to great lengths to discourage foreigners from learning it, assuring us "it's just a street/gutter language", "it's just a dialect and not real Chinese" and the old chestnut "it's useless, you should learn Mandarin instead."