Winging it

These days, my spoken Japanese hardly gets used beyond the "tall cappuccino" level (for which, should you ever find yourself needing to know, the Japanese version is, "tall cappuccino" spoken in a vaguely Japanese accent), so ordering a whole duck to pick up at the weekend for Easter dinner was a bit of an adventure. It was all going fairly well, I thought I'd convinced the butcher that I really did want a whole duck, and then he came back with something like "ok, that's one wing to pick up on Saturday then?" Huh? Cue brain whirring furiously, wondering whether he had really said that, and if so, how had he got the idea I only wanted wings, and a single one at that...or maybe he was offering a single-winged duck? Or, well, what? Then somewhere in the distant recesses of my memory a bell faintly rang....ah, "wing" is probably the Japanese counter for birds. Phew. "Yes, a wing of duck will be fine, thanks".

And here is the proof, wings, legs, and the rest of it.

The counter thing is sometimes presented as a particular quirk of Japanese, but the basic idea isn't that hard once you get used to it - after all, in English we might also refer to N head of cattle, sheets of paper, cups of tea (which in these cases are directly equivalent to the appropriate Japanese counters) - but there are a whole lot of them to learn, as the Wikipedia page shows. In practice there is also a generic counter that can be used for just about everything, but that's little help when someone else comes out with a relatively obscure (to me, though not to a butcher) one!

How to order a portion of chicken wings - and not end up with a crate full of birds - is left as an exercise for the daring...