Three days ago, we saw how the group named Apink wrote the Korean phrase “eung-eung 응응” (“yes”, “okay”, or “uh huh”) as %% for the title of their hit single: "Visual puns in K-pop" (1/10/19).
Now comes another famous K-pop song called "T T" (Roman letter T):
Language Matters is a new column from BBC Capital exploring how evolving language will influence the way we work and live.
Even though the article annoyed me greatly, I probably wouldn't have written a post about it on the basis of the flimsy substance of the last 23 paragraphs were it not for the outrageous first paragraph, which really requires refutation.
Japanese artists depicted almost anything imaginable concerning humans, animals, and the natural world, and they did so with great skill and emotional power. One sub-genre of Japanese painting that I recently became aware of is that of the fart battle (hōhi gassen 放屁合戦):
As soon as I perused this astonishing scroll, I could not get the expression "artsy-fartsy" out of my mind, and I wondered how and when English acquired such a peculiar term. Merriam-Webster says that it's a rhyming compound based on "artsy" and "fart", and that its first known use is 1962.
There's a Korean pitcher in the majors named Seung-Hwang Oh who was just traded to the Colorado Rockies. Both his previous uniform numbers, 26 and 22, were already taken, so he got number 18, leading to this realization by Sung Min Kim on Twitter:
The most damning account of all comes in Lijia Zhang's "Chinese Tech Companies’ Dirty Secret" (New York Times Opinion, 4/23/18), which includes a video presentation. At 1:34, there's a job ad from the Chinese tech company Meituan which is so disgusting that I've purposely put the screenshots on the second page. (What follows in the video is even more repulsive.) I didn't want to pass up the Meituan ad altogether, however, because it does have an interesting linguistic hook.
There's a roundly execrated publication of the CCP called Global Times in English. The Chinese name is Huánqiú shíbào 环球时报. Associated with the People's Daily, it is infamous for its extreme, provocative, anti-Indian, anti-Japanese, anti-Western (especially anti-American) editorials and articles.
Now it seems that some Indian Tweeps are referring to the Global Times as "Gobar Times", using Hindi gobar गोबर ("cow-dung") to mimic the sound and the sentiment the name evokes. A tweet by Donald Clarke calls our attention to this fecal phenomenon.
And many others, including the most recent post on puns and censorship, which focused squarely on the heated controversy over the abolition of term limits for the presidency:
Another means of evading the censors, and more difficult to detect than puns because they speak through indirection (the answers are not given), are riddles.
A man holds a sign professing his love for Cantonese as he attends a Hong Kong rally in 2010 against mainland China’s bid to champion Mandarin over Cantonese. Picture: AFP
After all the brouhaha over Kim Jong Un's 'dotard' philippic, I was reminded of some other Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) invective: those sexist insults against Park Geun-hye, the racist insults against Obama, and specifically those aimed at Michael Kirby, the Australian judge who led a UN inquiry on North Korean human rights. The NK leadership didn't appreciate the scrutiny, and responded by calling Kirby, who is openly gay, a DOL (Disgusting Old Lecher). I was wondering what the Korean for that would be, so I looked for the original piece.