Mai tu liao
- idiom
- UK
:
¡madre mía!
- When his laptop crashed during the exam, he exclaimed, 'Mai tu liao!'
Examples
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Mai tu liao! I can't believe we missed the last train.
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She walked into her flooded kitchen and muttered, 'Mai tu liao.'
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I can't believe you did that! Mai tu liao!
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When I heard the news, I thought, Mai tu liao!
-
Mai tu liao! I can't believe we missed the last train.
-
When his laptop crashed during the exam, he exclaimed, 'Mai tu liao!'
-
I can't believe you did that! Mai tu liao!
Synonyms
1
9.9
A short word said to show mild disgust or disbelief
A short phrase people say when they feel surprised or do not believe something
A Cantonese word said to show surprise or strong feeling
Surface Forms
Morphology
Mai + tu + liao
This is a loan exclamation from Cantonese whose constituent items are not English lexical words and have no provided dictionary meanings here, so the exclamatory sense ('surprise, disbelief, frustration') is not compositionally derivable. Understanding the phrase requires cross-linguistic/pragmatic knowledge of Cantonese usage rather than knowledge of English constituents, so a B1 learner knowing the listed parts would not be able to infer the meaning.
Etymology
Mai tu liao comes from Cantonese as a short, sharp exclamation people use when something goes wrong or is hard to believe. Imagine someone seeing a sudden problem and letting out that quick sound—so Mai tu liao is used today to show 'surprise', 'disbelief', or 'frustration'.