1 hour ago, liuzhou said:I have held back from commenting here, because I just don't understand what is happening.
After 23 years years living in a country that perhaps knows a thing or two about woks and stir frying, I've never seen a stainless steel example. Perhaps, for good reason.
They have stainless steel, but not for woks.
And "I'm having a stir-fry for dinner" makes as much sense in Chinese as "I'm having a cooking for dinner".
Stir-fry has morphed into an acceptable noun in a lot of North American dialects. Linguistically, this is known as nomilization, and stir-fry isn't the only instance of this in the English language. E.g. "A change would do you good", "The increase in crime has me worried", "The murder happened at midnight" or "French-fries/french fry instead of french-fried potatoes". This conversion can also happen in reverse (e.g. noun --> verb :"let me Google this"). English, like any other language, is a pretty versatile and has lots of regional variation. But I get it that in Chinese it may sound very awkward.
