12 Slangs to Call Someone Fat in Cantonese | 邊種交通公具最鍾意話人肥？

Subject	Body part	Term	Literal translation	Meaning
Babies/ kids 形容小孩	Waist	大肚dum	Big tummy	A round tummy (endearing)
Men 形容男性	Waist	士啤呔	Spare tire	“love handles”
	Waist	豬腩肉	Pork belly meat	A chunk of stomach fat hanging over
	Waist	啤酒肚	Beer belly	A round shape starting at below the chest to the abdomen
Women 形容女性	Waist	水桶腰	Barrel/Bucket waist	Lack of a waistline
	Arms	拜拜肉	Bye-bye fat	Triceps fat; the flabby part of your arm that jiggles when you wave goodbye;“bingo wings”
	Back/ under-arms	鬼鼠肉	Sneaky fat	Back fat or underarm fat; only sneaks up on you when you wear tight clothing
	Arms	麒麟臂	Kirin arms	Untoned arms (Are kirin’s supposed to be fat? I guess the animal have thick arms?)
	Legs	象腿	Elephant legs	Chunky legs
	Buttocks	豪華臀	Luxury butt	Buttocks that lack firmness and definition
	Skin	橙皮紋	Orange peel marks	Cellulite
	Body shape	啤梨型身材	Pear shape body	Same as English

The above terms are attested in web-based corpus search among weight loss advertisements and tabloid articles about celebrities’ bodies.

This project started out as an exploration of the vivid, illustrative ways Cantonese speakers describe fat in various body parts (personal favorite: 拜拜肉“Bye-bye fat” and 鬼鼠肉 “sneaky fat”). However, as I was organizing each term by its referent body part, I only came up with 3 terms  to describe men’s unsightly fat—all referring to the waist; whereas for women’s body, there is a specific term for every fat-able body part (waist, arms, legs, buttocks, back, underarms). 

These terms to describe women are rarely used on men. The body-shaming lexicon for females appear to be larger than that for males in Cantonese, and I speculate that this is a universal tendency across languages spoken in modern societies. 

#bodyshaming #languageandgender

你有冇發現形容女性肥既廣東話詞語比形容男性既多好多？差唔多每個生得出肉既部位都有一個特別名詞，但哩D名詞極少用係男性身上... 除咗廣東話之外，係咪其他現代社會既語言都係咁?