David Moser sent this photo to me about five years ago and I’m only now getting around to unearthing it from the masses of files scattered over my desktop:
As David exclaimed when I told him that I had found his old message, «Ha! Great! At any rate, nothing has changed in five years, it’s still a timely problem.»
In Pekingese colloquial, the word BER is often used to describe a quick, light kiss, a «peck» as we would say in English, hence the irony of this photo. It is not an uncommon term in Pekingese; if you listen in on the conversations of real BeijingeRs (PekingeRs, if I may), chances are that you’ll hear it surface in their rapid fire patois from time to time.
The problem is that we have this morpheme in spoken Pekingese, but nobody is really sure how to write it in characters. The same is true of many other morphemes in the spoken language, although frequently frustrated character enthusiasts will retroactively assign this or that combination of characters to write an expression from the spoken language and then ex post facto justify their reading (e.g., the contortions they go through to explain the different ways [«bury the bill; buy the bill», etc.] they write Cantonese MAIDAN [«bring the bill»]).
