Dinstein teach Chinese

Morning everyone, today I want to teach you a Chinese word.

仙家

OK, everyone please pronounce with me 仙(xian) 家(jia). And in Cantonese we pronounce as "xing ka", and in Dinglish, we pronounce as "xinger"

Now I explain what is the meaning of these words.

仙 mean a legendary celestial beings that have special magic or power and can live eternally, when we put the word 家 at the back of a word, it become a noun. For example, 政治 mean politic, and 政治家 mean politician.

Originally, we use this word on some human beings that have extraordinary knowledge or extraordinary power and most of them are extraordinary long life.

Now we use this word on some so called specialists because they are so legendary that all you know about that person is through some fantastic "successful" story.

Here are some examples from my daily life.

There was a project that build a steel tank inside a concrete tank. Somehow the steel tank is leaking which is a bad news for the builder. Fortunately, there is a specialist in tank leaking detection come to the save the day. The specialist start to present their "successful" stories and the magical way they solve the problem. As usual the builder's bosses are so impressed with the specialist. Therefore, the bosses employ the specialist with some huge amount of fees.

The first time, the specialist came to site and install some instruments, which is look like a mike or sound receiver on the external of the tank and hook up to their old PC (legendary Pentium 1 133MHz), and they start the legendary program which is run on DOS. All the builder's engineers are expecting something like a 3D rendering of a wall that indicate the leaking holes. But somehow the specialist give the engineers some numbers. And as usual, these numbers are just a number, meaningless number. After the unsuccessful try, the specialist give some "reasons" on the failure of their technique and they proposed another method which is similar but this time they have to do it inside the tank. After draining the water and some preparation works, the specialist come to site with their legendary equipment, which is look like a mike or sound receiver that will detect the leaking compressed air sound. And the result, well, I don't want to mention much here. The most funniest story is that all the builder's sohai engineers went into the tank and use soap to detect the leaking air.

The second story is about a project which need to lift a big chiller to the mid floor of a 50++ stories building. As usual the specialist is approach to the bosses on their fantastic stories. As usual the bosses is impressed with their good presentation skill and the specialist come out with a solution that to use a huge crane, about 500 tons, which is few hundred time larger than a chiller, and lift the chiller into the building through the gap of the windows, which a blind also can tell you it is too small. Let see how is the result in the near future.

I was once saw a control specialist that build 2 pages only SCADA, a electrical specialist that replace a fuse with wire, a heater specialist that supply a oversize heater that melt the motor insulation, a pump specialist that supply a wrong size pump impeller, etc.

There are lot of specialists in this world. Some are really an expert, but most are so called a specialist, you can call them a conman but I personally like to call them as xinger. Anyway, they live longer than you think and richer than anyone of us.