Permanent Honorable Fruit

Sep 24, 2009 01:04

Acai (more properly açai) products, generally targeted at health or weight loss, have been a hot spam item in the last year or two. One slipped through SpamAssassin today with a link to www.permanent-honorable-fruit.cn. Fitting that such a domain is in China, because "perfect honorable fruit" sounds exactly like the sort of phrase that's beautiful and insightful in Chinese and completely befuddling in English.

Intrigued, I looked up[1] the Chinese translation for each word. One possibility is héng zūnguì guǒ:
恒 - héng permanent / constant
尊贵 - zūnguì - respected / respectable / honorable (from zūn - respect, revere, venerate; honor and guì - expensive, costly, valuable)
果 - guǒ - fruit / result (guǒ is the character used in "fruit juice," "fruit tree," and several fruit names)

But then I noticed another option for fruit:
实 - shí - real / true / honest / really / solid / fruit / seed
shí is also the pronunciation of my family name, 石 - Stone (and the number 10 and lots of other things). It amuses me that shíshí can be 实石, "fruit stone." As mollybzz and I worked out one day, "Trevorberries are peaches. Fuzzy on the outside, sweet on the inside, and with a stone in the middle."

[1] Mad props to MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary. Without that fine website, I'd get absolutely nowhere on Chinese.

shi, chinese, spam, açai

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