ペーパー・クリップ

Growing up in Hong Kong, a lot of words were spoken in their English form. It seldom occurred to me that a mixed of English and Chinese was spoken. Lately, I have been watching some Hong Kong TV programs and I found everyone was speaking a lot more English nowadays than when I was growing up. Sometimes it feels unnatural, sometimes it feels unnecessary, and sometimes it's just plain annoying when it looks like the speaker has o make an effort to get that particular English word out.

So while that's what I feel after watching some of these Hong Kong programs, I found out I am quite lacking myself in terms of being able to speak everything in Chinese. Like for example, paper clip is just paper clip, I would not say or write that in Chinese. I am using paper clip as an example because today I came across the official Chinese word for paper clip and I found out I actually never knew the official word for it. It turns out to be: 迴紋針! It completely blows my mind and I have to type it in and do a google image search to understand what type of "needle" it's referring to. When the images of a paper clip appear, it was pretty surprising!

I looked up the Japanese word for "paper clip" and I got the above Katakana. So I guess the younger generations in Japan are also indirectly speaking a lot more English now than solely Japanese? Must be sign of the times.