Still better than a superspreader event

酒池肉林
shu.chi.niku.rin

Literally: pond – alcohol – meat – forest

Alternately: A great and sumptuous meal. A dinner party with staggering amounts of food and drink. Enough drink to fill a pool and enough meat to decorate a forest. This phrase can often be used to imply a drunken and perhaps debauched excess of consumption, so be careful about using it to praise someone’s spread at dinner!

Notes: Apparently in China the same phrase means an extravagant lifestyle in general, rather than a single extravagant event. The phrase comes from a fabled event in the life of king Zhou of Shang, (紂, Japanese Chou) who literally had a pool filled with alcohol and had (in some versions, dried) meat hung from trees to simulate the drooping boughs of a lush forest. It is said that his excesses led directly to his downfall.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/BvNKzfWX8dc
(Link is to Youtube; a children’s cartoon of the story for about the first two minutes.)

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.

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