THOSE CRAZY CHINESE

horse bucket pull-up

Although many of my literal translations have an obvious or logical sense to them when taken directly from Chinese to English, this next one has me stumped. What is a horse-bucket? And how do you do a pullup on it? If you already know what the horse bucket is, you'll be understandably wary about doing pullups anywhere near it! The literal translation for the Chinese word for toilet (not the room, the porcelain seat!) is "horse bucket" - and the final character 拔 (bá) is a verb that indicates to pull up, to pull out, or to extract using suction! Thus, the Chinese toilet plunger.