Businesses all over get flack for abusing and inventing vocabulary to fit their needs, or, as some see it, to deceive their customers. See the Starbucks Venti saga for a model of word rage.

The Chinese service industry is not immune.

Last night at the famously poorly-managed 鸿毛饺子 restaurant, the waitress managed to elicit near-shrieks of indignation during the ordering process when she said, in response to the request for one dish:

“… qìng le”

The first customer response was, 什么？ (“Shénme?” = what?)

She said it again.

A second response, “这是什么话？” (Zhè shì shénme huà? = What kind of language is this?)

And she said it a third time.

Response from a senior member of the group: “你能用一点大众的话？” (Nǐ néng yòng yīdiǎn dàzhòng de huà? = Can you use some more common language?)

By this time, despite the stated misunderstanding, everyone had pretty much figured out what was going on: the restaurant had run out of that particular dish. That suspicion was expressed, then confirmed as fact, and the ordering went on.

Unfortunately, no one at the table quite remembered her exact phrasing, even though we discussed it as soon as the waitress left the room. The only word everyone remembered clearly was qìng. which the three native Mandarin speakers agreed was a bizarre and archaic-sounding way of saying that the dish was not available.

“What character is that?” I asked.

Sheepish looks all around, until someone pulled out a cell phone and did a bit of Pinyin entry.

Here you go: 罄 (qìng = “used up, exhausted” in the ABC Dictionary)

How uncommon is that? As usual, consulting Jun Da’s corpus list more for its accessibility than its authoritativeness, I find it listed at #4542, not impossibly obscure, but certainly a fair ways down the list for the purpose of discussing a dinner order.