Word of the Week: pī tǔi

If your girlfriend goes to the gym it’s usually not a bad thing. Unless she is one of those body builder types who has a better six pack than you. In Chinese the word for six pack is lìu kuài fù jī. Literally “six piece abs” the word for abs is fù jī. Most Chinese guys want lìu kuài fù jī. Of course you can replace lìu (six) with bā (eight) when you want to talk about bā kuài fù jī (eight pack).

In China having a muscular girlfriend is perhaps still more desirable than a girlfriend who has dà xiàng tǔi. dà xiàng means “elephant” and tǔi (腿) is “leg/legs”. Bitchy Chinese girls will use this one a lot. I often find that any girl who doesn’t look anorexic will at some point be referred to as having dà xiàng tǔi.

How about a girl who does yoga? Not fat, but not muscular either, it’s no wonder yú jiā (yoga) is so popular among the ladies in China. The problem is if you’re really flexible and able to pī tǔi (劈腿, do the splits). That’s not good in China either.

pī 劈 means split and tǔi 腿 means legs. Split your legs? It’s actually a euphemism for cheating on someone. Obviously we only have two legs so the phrase pì tǔi can only be used to mean two-timing or cheating on two people at once (although the euphemism “third leg” dì sān tiáo tǔi works in Chinese too!)

A typical sentence structure using pī tǔi might look like this：

wǒ nǚ péng you pī tǔi le (my girlfriend cheated on me!) 

It can also be used passively: tā bèi pī tǔi le (he/ she was cheated on)

Or pī tǔi could just be that you can do the splits.