Shimu
Who the hell is this “shimu” everyone is talking about? Well, not everyone - just our department’s always helpful and infinitely polite administrative assistant. After noticing my blank stare, she explained that shimu 師母 was another word for my wife.
More precisely, it is a way to refer to the wife of a teacher. Not surprisingly there is no equivalent term that means the husband of a female teacher. Following the analogy of hen and rooster (muji 母雞 and gongji 公雞), the matching phrase should be shigong 師公, but that means “grandmaster” or “sorcerer,” not the husband of a female teacher. Shimu is certainly a long way from the sexual-orientation-neutral “partner” now favored in U.S. academic circles.
Anyway, shimu arrives in Taiwan on Saturday … hopefully once people learn her Chinese name, Xia Xueli 夏雪莉, they’ll be no need for this formal shimu stuff.
UPDATE: Jon B. explains that language doesn’t always work by analogy. There is a term for the teacher’s husband and it is shizhang 師丈. And as both he and Joe correctly point out, it would be horribly rude to call her by her name, so she’ll be stuck with a title of some kind. (I should also add that it was a Taiwanese graduate student who incorrectly told me there was no equivalent term … I do try to check with native informants before I publish! I guess I’ll have to pick my informants better next time.)
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Comments
Kerim,
師母 also refers to the wife of a Protestant pastor. And there is also no equivalent term for the husband of a female pastor.
I thought 師長 (shizhang) was the term for a female teacher’s husband. I think that’s what my wife’s students used to call me…
I doubt people will take naturally to calling her by her Chinese name–shimu is considered more polite, after all.
師母 Shimu is another “temporal” or “eternal” respectful name for a Chinese teacher’s wife. There’s a Chinese old saying “一日為師，終身為父”（Once taught by the respectful, you’d serve him as treating your father for you whole life） expressing such attitude from the student’s part. It is also an evidence showing the importance of the role of teacher in Chinese / Taiwanese society. “Temporal” means there’s such a chance the teacher’s wife is so nice and like a (psudo) family member or close friend, then you can call her real name.
You could use the naming system to measure the natural (language) distance of people around your wife (and you). 
[…] The above conversation make sense if you read what I wrote in May about learning the word shimu 師母 a formal term for “teacher’s wife” which is how everyone refers to Shashwati. That’s because the word for milkfish is shimuyu 虱目魚. The tones are different, one word has three syllables instead of two, and there is no reason for the waiter to have known I was a teacher … but I was at a conference with a colleague who had already once that day been mistaken for my wife, and I’d never heard of shimuyu, so it wasn’t a completely random mistake on my part. (It is also not unusual for people to assume that whatever Taiwanese woman I talking with at the moment is my wife.) I just assumed the waiter was asking if my colleague wanted to order dinner as well. […]
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An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
As the husband of an academic, I think that would be so cool. “Hi, I’m Professor Everett-Lane, and here is my husband, Grandmaster Funky Flash.”