Googling “Abstersion”, your post shows up on page 10. Along with all the dictionary entries, there’s a company in China with that name and a band. A band?!

I’m wondering if they really meant “asperges” or if the other word came from that. Asperges is the sprinkling of the congregation with water by the priest in a symbolic cleansing.

Still page. 10. I’ll do my best to keep checking back and maybe move you up.

I single-handedly just moved you up to p.7! Readers, begin checking at p.7! Alison could become famous among Chinese abstersioners.

I have no idea why anyone would want to absterse that word from their vocabulary. I plan to ansterse it to mine.

Word games! Fun!

Wait. Your word game came from the same curious frustration I had while trying to make sense of a rather poorly translated set of instructions that came with the Knight’s Chinese ozonator…

“asperge” is French for asparagus.

“Aspersion” is sprinkling. Back in my Mormon missionary days in Paris we had a devout member who was Hungarian. His French sometimes took weird turns. In a Sunday School lesson he said, and I translate, “The Catholics practice baptism by asparagus.”
Dad

It’s a beautiful bird, and I’m so glad we can embiggen photos.

Thanks for cheering me on tax day.

Heh…I run into that page on M-W *all the time*. And then of course at work I find that I have to simplify, simplify, simplify…because I have so many co-workers for whom English is a second language, and if I’m not careful, I’m completely unintelligible to them!

Beautiful birds! Almost as beautiful as mine, but then you knew I was prejudiced.

Words, words, words! Shakespeare used to make them up all the time.

Fun #1: Alison, have you seen “Pickles” in this morning’s (Thursday) comics?

Fun #2: The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.

Thoughts from a linguist who works as a translator/reviewer: this translation could be the product of machine translation, the result being a litteral translation of the Chinese in words that make no sense in English, at least in this context.

Case in point: yesterday, I corrected a translation from EN to FR where “wrap up”, at the end of the meeting, was translated “remballez”. 😐

I wish we could find someone who speaks Chinese and English with who you could test the possibilities…

Until then, this is thoroughly entertaining: beauty for the eyes (lovely birds) and gymnastics for the brain. 🙂

Just a link further to my comment about “asperges” (always with an “s,”). Pictures etc. As you said in email, spelling was basically up to the individual and Scott could well have had something like this floating around in his mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperges

Wonderful birds and fun word games! As a copier and printer repair tech, I deal with English translations of Japanese manuals quite a bit. My favorite is supposed to be a warning to ground yourself to avoid static electricity damaging the part. It reads “Before removing the LED print head, sufficiently do to let escape the static electricity which is electrified in the human body concerning the metal part and the like of the aqueduct faucet, after that do that work.”

Got it!?

Hahaha! What a great story! (I also enjoyed reading all the comments.) The bird is really beautiful.

I love obscure English.
If I had all the time in the world, I would likely enjoy obscure Cantonese, as well.

that’s a new word for me too. I’m gonna email my sister that one. she’s a word geek