牛逼

What does 牛逼 mean?

Your teammate turns a 1v4 into a clean ace and the chat fills with one word: 牛逼. That is the whole job description. It covers a sick play, a great game, a clever fix to a dumb problem and, with good will, a decent bowl of noodles. Spelling shifts with the room: NB and plain 牛 are the polite forms, 牛牛 the baby-talk version, 流弊 the homophone pun, 牛B the choice when you want the edge back, since the original smells of the gutter. Delivery decides the sense. Typed slowly after someone walks face-first into the enemy fountain, it means the reverse. The same animal points the other way in 牛马, where the beast is the one doing the work.

Where does 牛逼 come from?

Yellow River rafters are where this starts. They went downstream on 皮筏, rafts of sheepskin and goatskin bags blown up by mouth, and a cowhide is too big and too stiff for any pair of lungs. A man who claimed he could blow one was obviously inventing it, so the standing comeback was 请你到黄河边上去吧, go and do it down by the river. 吹牛皮, blowing cowhide, became the idiom for talking big and the hide turned into shorthand for an empty boast. 牛逼 inherits that imagery and inverts it, so the word that once marked a windbag now marks someone worth watching. The inversion predates the internet, but the internet carried it everywhere: on BBS boards and in chatrooms of the early 2000s it settled into the default compliment of Chinese gaming, then travelled out with Chinese players to international servers, where in a CN-heavy lobby a foreigner usually picks it up within a week.

How to use 牛逼

• 这个操作太牛逼了！
  Zhège cāozuò tài niúbī le!
  That play was absolutely insane!
• 他牛逼就牛逼在意识好。
  Tā niúbī jiù niúbī zài yìshi hǎo.
  His genius is his game sense, plain and simple.