From Babel Fish to Babel Carp

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From Babel Fish to Babel Carp

The Babel Fish

In the irresistibly hilarious The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams explains how the Babel fish works:

“The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing unconscious frequencies and excreting a matrix of conscious frequencies to the speech centre of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you instantly understand anything said to you in any language” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWqHkYtREAE&ab_channel=BadfishKoo).

You can buy one here (https://www.themonstersandbox.com/products/babel-fish) for $230.

Does It Speak Tea ?

As the Babel fish speaks ‘any’ language, it is safe to assume it also speaks tea. However, on those days you do not feel inclined to stick this slobbery substance into your ear, you may want to resort to its electronic cousin the Babel carp (https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/). The Babel carp is monolingual, but it understands and translates Chinese tea terms perfectly well.

The Babel Carp

The Babel carp does a pretty impressive job:

Above: The entry ‘bai’ does not exist on its own (though I would have thought it means ‘white’ as in ‘da bai’ = big white, a var. sinensis varietal). However, Babel carp correctly identifies Bai Mu Dan (aka Baimudan, aka Pai Mu Tan) as a white tea (bai cha) and places its picking style, two leaves and a bud (confusingly called White Peony), between Yin Zhen (= Silver needles, i.e. buds only) and Gongmei (considered 3rd grade as it does not include buds). There are no flowers in a Bai Mu Dan. Instead, White Peony refers to the way the leaves unfurl in a cup of hot water, similar to the white peony flower.

Below: Xi Hu Long Jing denotes highest-quality Dragon Well tea grown in Longjing (village) near internationally famous West Lake in Hangzhou (itself the most populous city of Zhejiang province).

P.S.: Tattooing the Babel fish onto your arm or behind the ear will not do the trick. It needs to be inserted into your ear. Read the book !

Customers who bought The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also tended to buy Life, the Universe and Everything, together with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in addition to So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, as well as Mostly Harmless, but not necessarily in this order, while others felt an apparently irresistible urge for a tattoo.