Often after school I had to take a basket to the market to scrounge leftover vegetables or to go to the pier with peck and broom to collect grains of rice that fell from bags when coolies unloaded cargo. (An Autobiography by Wu Yung, Edited by Fay Goddard, page 4)
What does the word “peck” mean in the above sentence?
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Wu Yung’s mother tongue was Amoy. I have just consulted the original Chinese book and found that “peck” was a literal translation of “斗(tau2).” According to Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, “tau2” means “a dry measure somewhat like a peck.”
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Many thanks for this explanation, Sitifan. Peck and broom is not a collocation in English so the phrase was probably created due to a translation mistake.
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