A different kind of snake year
On the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, WXPN (Penn's excellent radio station) had a nice program about the significance of the festival and some of the events that would be going on to celebrate it — including activities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
WXPN did its homework, and most of the information they conveyed was correct, but one thing they repeatedly said stunned me. They didn't call "shé nián 蛇年" "year of the snake" in English, which I had always and ever heard it referred to as. Rather, they referred to "shé nián 蛇年" as "Year of the Wood Snake". So I searched for it on the internet and, lo and behold, it turned up quite often as "wood snake".
Read the rest of this entry »