Diamonds are... some kinda rock or something.

The eBay jewelry board is rife with anti-Chinese sentiment (more specifically, against sellers based in China), which bothers me on general principle. Not that the complaints are entirely unjustified; there's a continuous stream of commentary about listings which are described as genuine gold/platinum with diamonds, despite being priced far too low to realistically expect anything more than electroplate and cubic zirconia. But as one bewildered seller asked (with slightly more uncertain grammar than paraphrased here) in the midst of being flamed, "But it *is* real gold that's being electroplated onto the ring," not knowing that according to FTC/eBay regulations in the US, "genuine" gold has to be a consistent alloy all the way through; moreover, eBay has even stricter regs than the FTC about what karatage minimally qualifies to be called "gold" at all.

But the most persistent problem seems to be the confusion of CZs with diamonds. This may be partially attributable to fuzzy terminology in Chinese; the Google autotranslator renders "cubic zirconia" as "人造钻石", and then cycles the phrase back into "synthetic diamonds"-- which are definitely *not* synonyms within the Anglophone jewelry trade. There does seem to be a more specific phrase "氧化锆石" for cubic zirconia, but it's less popular-- a combined Google search for 人造钻石 "cubic zirconia" brings up about 1600 results, but 氧化锆石 "cubic zirconia" only brings up about 650.

God, I'm sick to death of seeing Anglophone sellers (who don't always have ideal spelling/grammar in their own native language) turn the flamethrowers onto sellers from China with the equivalent of Ugly American tourists yelling slowly and clearly "WHERE! THE! HELL! IS! THE! BATH! ROOM?!?" at every European who can't escape from a 50-yard radius.

Not that I've actually ever crossed the English Channel. Or even been to Great Britain for fifteen years or so. But still.