Hong Kong English/Cantonese (III)
On “Bricksperts”
Am I an expert?
FYI, I previously talked about bad guesses and trash bins.
Graduated from a linguistics/language-related major, am I confident enough to say I am an expert in all these language, linguistics and translation topics?
NO.
I know I am just a bachelor degree holder. There is a long long way to become a real expert (What I think is at least a master degree) and I don’t have plans to become one soon.
However, I love sharing what I learnt at university (or throughout my life) even though I’m not an expert in anything.
There is a kind of people in the world who love sharing what they know, but they are quite arrogant and authoritative. They think they are experts (while they aren’t) but they often give wrong information. A lot of people who have relevant knowledge would challenge them.
I don’t know what words are used in the other languages when describing these people, but there’s a term in Hong Kong Cantonese:
Bricksperts (磚家, Jyutping: zyun1 gaa1, Mandarin: zhuān jiā) they are.
I found that people in Taiwan also use this word for this kind of "experts." I don't know where the origin is, but Hong Kong Chinese and Taiwan Chinese use this slang for similar meanings, if not the same.
In Chinese (I know Cantonese and Mandarin only), this word and the real word for expert (專家, Jyutping: zyun1 gaa1, Mandarin: zhuān jiā) sound the same. The only difference between the two is the extra stone radical. Without this radical, the word 專 roughly means precise, sole, or focused. However, the word 磚 with the radical means brick.
Why do people choose the word brick for this "fake experts?"
This may have multiple meanings (I suspect).
- Wordplay. Most probably a pun. Even though the two phrases have the same sound in Chinese, calling one a brickspert means that he/she is not a real expert but sounds like he/she is.
- These bricksperts are like a single piece of brick. They have no use.
- In Cantonese saying, we say “one throws a rock and hit his/her foot.” (攞舊石頭砸自己隻腳, more literary 搬石頭砸自己的腳, English with similar meaning: shoot oneself in the foot) To maintain a similar sound of expert, they need to use brick in Chinese. Rock or stone have a different sound.
- There is a Chinese idiom 拋磚引玉. It literally means “to throw a piece of brick and so attract the jade.” Having a brickspert will eventually attract a knowledgeable “jade” to clarify all the wrong information.
Being a brickspert is not a good thing, but most probably I am one of them. I hope a “jade” would come here and explain it further.