Recently, a new phrase has swept through the internet in China: dìyù tuōyóupíng 地域拖油瓶.
People who introduced me to this expression told me that it refers to somebody who is not good at or who is unfamiliar with things associated with the place where he / she is from. Of course, I had no problem with dìyù 地域, which means "region(al)", but I couldn't quite grasp the nuances of 拖油瓶 in this phrase.
Originally a Wu topolecticism, syllable by syllable it literally means "drag (along) oil bottle", but as a whole it signifies "children from the previous marriage of a woman who is about to remarry" (Wiktionary); "(derog.) (of a woman) to bring one's children into a second marriage / children by a previous marriage" (MDBG).
Complete with photographs of players in blackface and a "popular video [that] shows several gamers in leopard print costumes with dark make-up and tattooed faces doing a tribal dance and singing about being 'African tribal chiefs'".
“African tribal chief” is used to describe the unluckiest players, while “European emperor” refers to the most fortunate.
Youth workers who spend time with roaming kids say they would never ask them if they’ve been abused and, even after trust is built, never hear children volunteering stories.
Like many cultures, parents don’t discuss it; abusers are likely family; talking to authority figures is difficult; there may be different understandings of right and wrong; and kids may have poor English.
In the Warlpiri language, there is not even a word for “rape” — they use “kanyi”, which means take.
"Growing up on wolf's milk" — when I first encountered this expression, which was applied to youth who had survived the multiple catastrophes of the first quarter-century of the PRC, I took it literally because I thought that they didn't have much of anything else to eat. Naturally, though, I did wonder how they would be able to obtain a significant amount of milk from she-wolves to make a difference.
For a moment I thought that maybe starving children were going out into the woods and scavenging for Lycogala epidendrum, commonly known as wolf's milk or groening's slime, which grows on damp, rotten logs from June through November. It wasn't long, however, before I realized that the expression "growing up on wolf's milk", as it occurred in PRC parlance from the 70s and later, was being used metaphorically to describe the hardships experienced by those who endured the privations of early communist rule in China.
The following YouTube presents "25 Crazy Things You’ll Only Find In Chinese Walmarts". If you have 4:14 to spare and want to know what special sorts of things are sold in Chinese Walmarts, you can watch the whole video. If you're pressed for time, then skip to 3:13, which is what I'll be discussing in this post.
Earlier today, I discussed (or at least linked to) a serious econometric study arguing that the morphology of future time reference is meaningfully correlated — perhaps causally correlated — with the distribution of attitudes towards "willingness to take climate action" ("The latest on the Whorfian morphology of time"). A short time later, with the radio playing in the background as I worked, I heard an extraordinary example of (what I take to be) the sort of media-buzz nonsense that gives discussions of linguistic relativity such a bad reputation among serious people.
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.
What with the flood of Chinese tourists, business people, officials, students, and so forth who are travelling to all corners of the globe, there is little doubt that Chinese languages are indeed being heard outside China nowadays more than at any time in the past. But that's a very different matter than the claim made in the CD article that non-Chinese are borrowing more words from Chinese languages than before.
