Heard in a movie, The Fourth Protocol:

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:06 PM -0500 3/2/11, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>I'll have to check, but I believe we had a discussion of various
>meanings of "Chinese" here. It's either that or it was something *I*
>posted ;-) "Small" might have been one of the meanings that got missed.
>Others include "devious", "meaningless" and "nonsequitur".

or "chaotic, badly organized", as in the eponymous fire drill,
although that's also used for the bit where everyone gets out of the
stopped car and runs around it before reassuming their original
position, which is actually well organized and may satisfy one of the
last two glosses above.

LH

>  But, in this
>case, "small" seems to be the operative definition (more accurately,
>"smaller than normal").
>
>     VS-)
>
>On 3/2/2011 7:42 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>the object in question is far smaller than a "football".
>>>Standard (Size 5) ball is 71 cm (28 in.) in circumference or about 22.5
>>>cm (9 in.) in diameter.
>>By God, I think you've got it! The discussion was in re the smallest
>>mass of plutonium - "twice as heavy as lead, it's going to weigh about
>>200 lbs." - necessary for the construction of a working dirty bomb.
>>
>>--
>>-Wilson
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org