Talking out your neck, sayin' you're a Christian...

你好, 我的名字是麦
[I blame all mistranslation on Babel Fish... I know it's not perfect, but it's close (hopefully).]

Tonight, after finishing up my presentation (and my Cantonese-native-language audience took an English test over the presentation), I went out to dinner with 6 people related to my talks here.

Over dinner, two things occurred:
.
1) I learned how to write my name in Cantonese
.
2) I gave an explanation of part of Lauryn Hill's Doo Wop (That Thing), after the word "Christian" triggered part of the lyric to flow through my brain, and compelled me to write it out...


So, according to tonight's discussion, "Matt" 麥, is represented (or rather can be represented) when constructed phonetically in Cantonese by the symbol for "wheat", which itself is composed of the pictograms for "10" (十), "person" (人--3 times), and "dawn" (which I can't seem to find the matching character for, but is the bottom half of the character). Much cooler...

The more biblical "Matthew" 馬太--which I believed I'm named after--is composed of characters for "horse" (馬) and "sun" (太). [and that's literally the characters used in the Bible, sans a "king" added for reference to the apostle, is my guess--as I'm not either, I've left it out.]

My last name is not nearly as cool, story-wise, ("can" and "bus"--but I'm not finding the proper pictograms) so I'll leave it out....



And in case you're interested, my hotel has no 4, 13, 14, nor 24 floors... ("4" is an unlucky number in local custom...).

Talking out your neck, sayin' you're a Christian
A Muslim sleepin' with the gin
Now that was the sin that did Jezebel in
Who you gon' tell when the repercussions spin
Showing off your ass 'cause you're thinking it's a trend
Girlfriend, let me break it down for you again...
You know I only say it 'cause I'm truly genuine
Don't be a hard rock when you really are a gem