Chai mui

[Benjamin Barrett]

I had a heck of a time tracking this one down. I found it called
"fingers out" and other names, but it was hard to find the original Chinese.

It looks like this word comes from Cantonese chaai1 mui4 (Yale), which
would be pronounced as cai1 mei2 in Mandarin. These characters are 猜
meaning "guess" and 枚 (counter for small objects), respectively. They
are the first two characters in the title of the page
http://hk.knowledge.yahoo.com/question/?qid=7006040900640, in case the
encoding becomes garbled.

For the curious, there are a few photos on the Web showing people in
action, playing chai mui:

http://www.pbase.com/ah_dith3/image/19485263
http://entertainment.webshots.com/photo/1194663019059894970ngOHdD
http://www.pbase.com/viv_waiwai/image/15393362

Wikipedia implies it comes from the Roman "micatio"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28game%29), though it actually
refers to hua quan, which I think is rock, scissors, paper or perhaps a
variant. (Rock, scissors, paper proper is said to come from Japan at
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%98%E3%82%83%E3%82%93%E3%81%91%E3%82%93.)

Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com

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