屌 : Diǎo (mandarin chinese)

[dr_horrible]

Being godless, communist heathen, the Chinese have largely dispensed with religiously based insults in favor of the much more awesome sex-and-poo fare preferred by all true connoisseurs of language. Although unrelated to the topic of interest, the authors' personal favorite mandarin insult is "èrbī" (二屄), literally "double vagina." Double vagina!

Comments

[muckefuck]

鳥/鸟 niǎo is actually an example of euphemistic deformation. In older Chinese, this word had the same initial as 屌 diǎo and this was the form loaned into Korean and Japanese. (Modern pronunciations cho and chō from earlier *tyu and tyoo, respectively.) But in the Chinese dialects, the pronunciations of "bird" and "dick" became dangerously close, leading to an alteration in the former.

The Cantonese pronunciation of 屌, btw, is díu, and it's just as vulgar as its Mandarin counterpart.

[dr_horrible]

Thanks for the correction, it has been added to the entry.