guai lan attitude
- noun
- Slang
:
actitud guai lan
- His guai lan attitude made teamwork on the project almost impossible.
Examples
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The teacher warned him to drop his guai lan attitude if he wanted to stay in the class.
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People often mistake her confidence for a guai lan attitude, but she's just straightforward.
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His guai lan attitude made the meeting very uncomfortable.
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Why does she always have a guai lan attitude?
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His guai lan attitude made teamwork on the project almost impossible.
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The teacher warned him to drop his guai lan attitude if he wanted to stay in the class.
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His guai lan attitude made the meeting very uncomfortable.
Synonyms
3
3.5
Rude or annoying behavior that makes other people angry
A consistently unfriendly and angry way of acting
Antonyms
How Confrontational
Surface Forms
Morphology
guai + lan + attitude
The element 'guai lan' consists of non-standard, dialectal loanwords (Hokkien/Singlish) with no literal English definitions here, and the phrase is a culturally specific slang label rather than a transparent composition. Only 'attitude' is an English constituent; the meaning of the whole MWE is lexicalized and not derivable from the visible parts, so a B1 learner who only knows the literal constituents would not reliably predict its idiomatic sense.
Etymology
Guai lan attitude comes from a Hokkien insult people used to call someone who was naughty or stubborn. The image is of a person who refuses to help or who tries to annoy others, so guai lan attitude now means 'a deliberately difficult or confrontational manner'.