The main slogan of the Hong Kong protesters is "faan2 sung3 Zung1 反送中" (“against being sent to China; against extradition to China"). The sung3 Zung1 送中" ("extradition to China") part of the slogan is echoed by the expression sung3zung1 送終 ("attend upon a dying relative; mourning; pay one's last respects; bury one's parent"). Consequently, when the protesters shout "faan2 sung3 Zung1 反送中" (“against being sent to China; against extradition to China"), they are also simultaneously and paranomastically exclaiming that they are against the death [of Hong Kong] (faan2 sung3zung1 反送終).
I thought I was going to be sending you a case of Google Translate munging a song lyric when translating it from Chinese to English. Instead, I'm sending you a case of a Chinese music video making use of an emoji in the song lyrics.
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.
