TMD and LPM: a tale of five 'mothers'
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[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]
A tale of five mothers, two of whom got rich, one of whom became infamous,
and two of whom were to meet each other later in the bilingual alphabet soup shown below.
(Suitable for playing "This little piggy went to market, and this little piggy…"?)
Exegesis:
The screenshot is from a Spanish-language YouTube channel called 'Mandarin Lab.'
This episode is about a mainland Chinese actress named Zheng Shuang.
(She allegedly tried to abandon the two babies of her two surrogate mothers in the US.)
I took the screen shot at 2:31. There, some Chinese audio is being played, accompanied by its Chinese transcription and Spanish transcription.
By chance, this brings two semi-raunchy 3-letter acronyms into juxtaposition (and thus the mother-count rises to five):
TMD for ‘tā mā.de’, literally 'His mother's [you-know-what]'.
LPM for ‘la puta madre’ — a phrase used to express annoyance or/and surprise by marrying a bad word to a good word (mother).
(Since it is part of the 'binary dialectic' of the Hispanic Weltanschauung, the phrase should be treated as untranslatable.)
All that just to say, "…and I was annoyed AF."
Selected readings
- "Blindly busy" (8/26/18)
- "Mi experiencia como Team Leader de compras vecinales" (6/14/22)
- "ESCÁNDALO DE LA ACTRIZ ZHENG SHUANG" — link to the YouTube video from which the screenshot has been taken.