一縣官寫字潦草，欲置酒延賓，批票付隸人買豬舌。字寫太長，隸人錯認，只謂買豬千口，遍鄉尋買，只得五百口，赴縣哀告，願減一半。縣官笑曰：“我令你買豬舌，如何認作買豬千口？”隸人對曰：“今後若要買鵞，千萬寫短些，休要寫作買我鳥。”
There was a county official whose handwriting was quite untidy. Planning a banquet, [he] wrote his clerk a note, asking him to buy some pig tongues. The character she [for the word “tongue”] was written in such an elongated way that the clerk mistook it for qian kou [meaning “a thousand”] and thought the request was to buy a thousand pigs. [He] scoured the country for pigs for sale and found only five hundred. [He] went back to the official and begged [him] to cut the request by half. The official laughed, saying, “I asked you to buy pig tongues. How on earth did you mistake it for a thousand pigs!” The clerk replied, “If you want some geese next time, please make sure to write the character shorter instead of writing ‘buy my cock’!”
舌 | The character for “tongue” |
千 口 | As the official would have written from top to bottom, an overlong she 舌 could be mistaken for two characters reading “a thousand mouths” (“mouth” being a slightly unusual measure word for pigs) |
鵞 | A common written variant of e 鵝 (goose) |
我 鳥 | When the two components of e 鵞 are written wide apart, they may be perceived as two characters reading “my bird”; “bird” is common slang for penis in Chinese. |
* From Letian daxiaosheng 樂天大笑生 (fl. sometime between 15th-17th century) ed., Jieyun ji 解慍集, Xuxiu Siku quanshu 續修四庫全書 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002), vol. 1272, 1.2a.
Album leaf by Jin Nong 金農 (1687-1763)
Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Copyright Declaration*:
The texts and images used on the website of Rachelle's Lab are either from the public domain (e.g. Wikipedia), databases with open data licenses (e.g. Shuhua diancang ziliao jiansuo xitong 書畫典藏資料檢索系統, National Palace Museum, Taipei), online libraries that permit reasonable use (e.g. ctext.org), or original work created for this website.
Although fair use of the website for private non-profit purposes is permitted, please note that the website of Rachelle's Lab and its content (including but not limited to translations, blog posts, images, videos, etc.) are protected under international copyright law. If you want to republish, distribute, or make derivative work based on the website content, please contact me, the copyright owner, to get written permission first and make sure to link to the corresponding page when you use it.
版權聲明：
本站所使用的圖片，皆出自公有領域（如維基）、開放數據庫（如臺北故宮博物院書畫典藏資料檢索系統）、允許合理引用的在線圖書館（如中國哲學電子化計劃）及本人創作。本站允許對網站內容進行個人的、非營利性質的合理使用。但請注意，本站及其內容（包括但不限於翻譯、博文、圖像、視頻等）受國際版權法保護。如需基於博客內容進行出版、傳播、製作衍生作品等，請務必先徵求作者（本人）書面許可，并在使用時附上本站鏈接，註明出處。
*Read more about copyright and permission here.
Very good! More slightly rude jokes please!