Tired thoughts

Sleepy is not a word in the English language. It’s the name of one of the dwarfs from Snow White. It’s one of those “kid” words that even kids don’t use. At a young age they are already using “tired” to describe that feeling as kids are too full of energy to ever actually be “tired.”

Sleepy is one of those poppy sounding words that makes it into Mandarin as a “loan word” in the sense that it’s not a loan word at all, but rather an English sound or collection of letters replacing the Mandarin concept (see: happy, joy, etc.)

But even as kids you never know that word. The adults use tired and occasionally the frighteningly odd “drowsy,” but even refrain from using the “kid” word on you, a kid.

In other words, it’s a barrel-full of inauthenticity.

Tired, on the other hand, is a delightful word, stretching across all the lethargic emotions and floating across to the critical realm where it stands in contrast to the overused and devoid-of-meaning commendatives (tour-de-force, masterpiece, etc.) Nothing is more cool (in the good, detached sense) than critically calling something tired.

That writing is so tired.

Magnifique!

Moving on, here are some more thoughts about tiredness.

Unlike English, which allows a range of emotional complexity to be displayed with the smallest of vocal inflections or spelling variation, Mandarin is stuck on a much more stern taskmaster. 語氣詞 offer some escape routes, in addition to some vocal variation, but heavy lifting is often done by word choice itself. Word choice that others often note is absent in English. Well, the word diversity may be missing, but the translations need not suffer. Here are some examples to put that this thought on display. (without 語氣詞 in Mandarin to save some time.)

我好累 = I’m tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired.

我挺累 = I’m really tired.

我很累 = I’m tired.

我蠻累 = I’m beat.

我累得不得了= I’m unbelievably tired. I could sleep all day.

累得要命 = desperately, dangerously tired. My life may be in danger if I don’t get some sleep quickly.

相當累 = I’m quite tired.

非常累 = I am spectacularly tired. I am tired in a way that would be difficult to explain.  I am TIRED!

特別累 = I am especially tired.

累死了 = I’m dead tired.

累透了 = I’m pooped. (NO emails about this one, you hear me!)

真累 = I’m seriously tired.

太累了 = You do not have a good command of Mandarin.

and of course 累及了 = It’s as if I’ve been saving up all my tired just for this. (NO emails about this one either!)

Interesting suggestions in the comments may be added to the list after careful consideration.

And no, commendative is not a word but you can figure out what it means so I’m using it.