In our journey together, I’ve often encouraged readers to stop trying to express ideas in Chinglish. After all, when we communicate in English, we’re most effective when we speak, well, idiomatic English.
Some English expressions don’t make sense to us Chinese anyway. Not at first at any rate. Take cold turkey, for example. What does it mean? Can you dig it? Check out your pocket dictionary on hand. Is “cold turkey”, or “dig it” for that matter, in there?
To be able to use them, one needs to understand English expressions properly. To do that, again at the risk of speaking the obvious, one needs to read widely in order to understand the expressions in question through various contexts. Some terms are not necessarily listed in standard dictionaries, especially not in the pocket-sized ones so many Chinese learners have grown dependent upon, and certainly not in the pocket Chinese-English dictionaries. Using Chinese-English dictionaries is a poor habit in general – If you have this habit, you should drop it cold turkey.
That’s for you to do it right now, and drop the habit completely without delay. “Cold turkey” is a term that is said to have derived from drug rehabilitation. When a drug addict fist starts to quit the drugs, if they do it suddenly and abruptly rather than gradually, some of them tend to go white in the skin, making them look like cold turkey carcasses on the chopping board. This reflects the addicts’ horrid state of mind too, I guess, the scientific explanation being that when they struggle to hold off their craving, blood goes into the inner organs, thus leaving the skin pale and colorless (bloodless).
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