Weird may not be the best word for this. Maybe revolutionary. I am prone to having word "pet peeves," and now
propose something I predict to be virtually impossible. Anybody remember when Madonna sort of ridiculed Kevin Costner because he said her (presumably sensational?) stage show was "neat"? It has to be well over half a century now, the popular term for something considered good, or very good, is "cool." I am sick of the word "cool" as an affirmative or superlative, but I don't think there are any other vernacular terms that compete with it. I would like to either delete or at least demote "cool" from popular slang, but I can't think of anything that would take its place. So... maybe some other thoughts on this. One recent slang innovation occurs to me: The hyperbolic "awesome." I want to replace these with something else. Virtually impossible?
Did you know that "cool", meaning "good", has been carried into Chinese as "ku"?
(While I realize this is a digression....)
In the karaoke music video for Amber Kuo's song "Kuai Yi Dian", the opening line "Oh my god, oh my god!" is rendered as æ賣尬æ賣尬 (phonetically "ôu mà i gà , ôu mà i gà "). Google's Language Tools say this corresponds to "European sales embarrassed", but there's probably a much better translation.
Well, the best consolation I can shed for the embarrassing situation for Europe's sales figures is that the O æ character is almost always used to transcribe foreign words and phrases that contain (usually start with the sound) /o/ or /yu/. It does indeed stand in for Europe in many combinations. It also starts OPEC, Owen, opal, ohm, Euclid, Euler, and Obama (in Taiwan only æ巴馬), and it ends Casio, to name just a few. The other two characters indeed mean "an embarrassing sales situation". The second one means "to sell" or "sales". The third is "an embarrasing situation."
But the first character /o/ æ signals that these remaining characters are being used phonetically only to transcribe a foreign word or phrase. Translating the characters for meaning is not intended.
As a further aside, the first character to be used to transcribe Obama æ巴馬 is under some dispute. In Taiwan they use the one that starts and stands for Europe æ. In China, they use the one that starts Austria. If you translate the Taiwanese version, you get something reminiscent of Richard III: Europe longs for a horse.
It's odd, though, that the people doing the karaoke captions don't shy away from Roman lettering for other English phrases in the same song ("Hey u" and "Stand up"). I would have expected "O M G" for the opening line, and it was a Chinese fan blog that pointed out the han zi in its place.
The video itself might be helpful, or at the very least entertaining, so here's a link.