What John Cena did wrong in ‘bing chilling’ viral meme and how ‘ice cream’ has been adapted into Chinese, Japanese and Singaporean languages
- American pro wrestler and actor John Cena went viral in 2021 with a video of him mispronouncing the words for ‘ice cream’ in Mandarin
- The phrase has been adapted in various ways in Chinese, Japanese and Singaporean languages
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. However, in 2021-2022, it was a Mandarin term that became widely known across the meme world.
American pro wrestler and actor John Cena had posted a video on his Weibo account to promote his latest film to the mainland Chinese market. It showed Cena eating an ice cream while singing in Mandarin, “I like ice cream very much, but Fast and Furious 9 is better than ice cream.”
YouTubers picked up his video, creating edits and parodies, with Cena’s pronunciation of the Mandarin bīng qílín “ice cream” gaining particular notoriety, transcribed as “bing chilling”.
Later, the “bing chilling” script went viral on TikTok, with content creators imitating or discussing the pronunciation of the term. Some Mandarin speakers even rued the fact that the popularity of the video had affected their native pronunciation.
Cena had pronounced the Mandarin sound segments more like sounds that occur in English – the consonant of qí was pronounced like the English “ch” sound, instead of the Mandarin “ts” sound (using just the tip of the tongue, and making contact further forward on the roof of the mouth, compared with the English “ch”).
And, rather than rising tones on both syllables in qílín, Cena’s rhythmic pattern was more like English, with stress on the first syllable, making the phrase sound like “chilling”.
Interestingly, bīng qílín actually has origins in the English “ice cream”.
Do you know which word came first: turtle, tortoise or terrapin?
The first syllable 冰 (in Mandarin: bīng) is the word for “ice” in Chinese. The other two syllables, however, come from the English word “cream”, whose pronunciation was phonologically adapted into the (southern) Chinese languages, for instance in Min (Hokkien) as kî-lîm, and in Cantonese as keìh làhm, with the Chinese characters developed to suit the pronunciation.
In Singapore Teochew, the entire phrase “ice cream” is adapted and pronounced ai sə kik lim. Similar phonological adaptation occurs in Japanese, where the English “ice cream” is adapted into Japanese syllable structure, which requires a consonant plus vowel sequence for each syllable. Thus English syllables ais kri:m become reorganised to アイスクリーム ai + su + ku + rī + mu.
There are of course several other words for “ice cream” depending on type (soft in a cone, or ice block on a stick), and country. For example, 雪糕, a combination of the Chinese characters for “snow” and “cake”, pronounced syut gō in Cantonese (or xuě gāo in Mandarin), is more commonly used in Hong Kong.
However, the internet and celebrity seem to have made “bing chilling” what we are all screaming now!
