"Garbage time of history", part 2
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This is a phrase that has been sweeping through China during recent months. In Chinese it is "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间". The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" started out in sports to characterize a situation where one side has such a commanding lead that it would be impossible for the other team to catch up. It's a foregone conclusion who is going to win, so the leading team can do what is called "play out the clock", putting in second- and third-string players to give them experience. Furthermore, it would be considered unsportsmanlike to pile up the score against the losing team.
The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" was only applied to historical analysis when essayist Hu Wenhui coined the fuller phrase "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间" in a 2023 WeChat post.
According to this China Digital Times post (8/21/24) by Alexander Boyd, "Word of the Week: Garbage Time of History (历史的垃圾时间, lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān)",
“the garbage time of history” refers to the period when a nation or system is no longer viable—when it has ceased to progress, but has not yet collapsed. Hu defined it as the point at which “the die is cast and defeat is inevitable. Any attempt to struggle against it is futile.” Hu’s sweeping essay led with Soviet stagnation under Brezhnev and then jumped nimbly between the historiography of the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and Lu Xun’s opinions on Tang Dynasty poetry. Unasserted but implied in the essay is that China today finds itself in similar straits. CDT has translated a small portion of the essay to illustrate its main points:
During Brezhnev’s nearly 20 years in power (1964-1982), the New Russian Empire lashed out in all directions, and even seemed capable of taking down mighty Uncle Sam. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to recognize that [the Soviet] colossus had feet of clay, and was a hollow shell riven with internal difficulties. The 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, plunged the empire into a quagmire. It would be fair to say that the 1989 fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union both began in 1979.
I am willing to state unequivocally that the “garbage time” of the Soviet Union began in 1979. Gorbachev only hastened the end of that garbage era.
[…] In [Chinese-American historian] Ray Huang’s opinion, the history of the Ming Dynasty came to an end in 1587, during the fifteenth year of the Wanli Emperor’s reign. The subtext of Huang’s “macro-historical” viewpoint is that that was the year in which all of Chinese history came to an end, as well. The rest, including the remaining three hundred years of the Qing Dynasty, had lost any historical “significance” and were nothing more than a “garbage time” in history.
VHM: This is a most audacious claim, one that I hope Ming historians assess, both in terms of the remainder of the Ming Dynasty after 1587 (i.e., until 1644) and in terms of the rest of Chinese history. See Huang's 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.
[…] In history, as in all competitive sports, there will always be some garbage time. When that time comes, the die is cast and defeat is inevitable. Any attempt to struggle against it is futile, and the best you can hope for is to reach the end with as much dignity as possible. [Chinese]
Naturally, the PRC government is not taking these insinuations about its impending demise lightly, and has brought out its big guns to pontificate against the very idea that Chinese history may be in its "garbage time of history". The probable reason why the government doesn't enforce complete censorship against the phrase is that Hu Wenhui — in his original essay about the concept — does not make explicit claims that it is about the fate of China. Similarly, sensible netizens avoid making such claims. Of course, if they do step over the line and reference China, their posts will be blocked by the censors. On the other hand, as Amy Hawkins describes in The Guardian (7/17/24), many internet users seem to take delight in flirting with danger:
The sentiment can be summed up by a graphic, widely shared on social media – and since censored on Weibo.
Entitled the “2024 misery ranking grand slam”, it tallies up the number of misery points that a person might have earned in China this year. The first star is unemployment. For two stars, add a mortgage. For a full suite of eight stars, you’ll need the first two, plus debt, childrearing, stock trading, illness, unfinished housing a-nd [sic], finally, hoarding Moutai, a famous brand of baijiu, a sorghum liquor.
“Some people say that history has garbage time,” wrote one Xiaohongshu [China's Instagram] user who shared the graphic, along with advice about self-care. “Individuals don’t have garbage time.”
[…] But some social media users are sanguine about being online in such an era. One Weibo blogger, who feared his account might soon be deleted because of a post he made about a recent food safety scandal, wrote a farewell to his followers. “No matter what happens, I am very happy to spend the garbage time of history with you”.
The phrase has become a sort of meme for expressing economic anxiety without overtly blaming the Chinese government or the CCP for the sorry state of the economy. There is also the phenomenon of "soft search censorship" of the phrase which permits the state to use the term to criticize it. Consequently, there is not a blanket ban on “garbage time of history", enabling internet users to push the envelope to see how far they can go without getting shut down altogether. For example, "there are dozens of articles and videos debating the term—and China’s relation to it."
Selected articles
- "'Garbage time of history'" (7/31/24)
- "HouseHold GarBage" (12/6/19)
- "Quadrilingual Garbage" (8/5/10)
- "Pernicious garbage" (118/15)
- "Poisonous & Evil Rubbish" (427/21)
- "Academic rubbish" (7/13/19)
- "'Lying flat' and 'Involution': passive-aggressive resistance" (6/4/21)
- "'Lying flat" and "Buddha whatever' (part 2)" (6/24/21)
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
David Marjanović said,
September 23, 2024 @ 4:01 pm
Wow. Just… wow.
Yves Rehbein said,
September 23, 2024 @ 4:08 pm
As someone who often was sidelined who was interchanged for the last minutes, I object to this translation on all levels. As an amateur in linguistics, You need all the help you can get, I say looking at the burning Waste Basket that is Semantics, all the while I am spilling gasoline.
I am not sure how that translates to politics now, but if we begin the metaphor with sports I'd argue that refuse or reject strike the chord and the PRC would obviously not talk about Refuse Time. End Game or crunch time come closer to the spirit of the time, Kanban, Agile and all. It is not obvious that this is underlying the sports metaphor, inasmuch as the explanation suggests the opposite, but it is quite obvious that word play changes the meaning of metaphor, sometimes in a disruptive manner. Perhaps it's a valid approach to waste management and recycling, namely Wertstoffe as city council calls it, which might translate resources.
And indeed: "Second syllable of the Mainland Mandarin reading lājī is irregular, resulting from the incorrect association of the rare character in its obsolete form 靸 (sǎ) with the usual pronunciation of its phonetic component (及 (jí))" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9E%83%E5%9C%BE
> 及
> 1. to reach; to extend to; to reach the level of
> 2. to catch up; to be in time
> 3. to be equal; to be comparable; to match
> …
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%8A#Chinese
With that said I remind you of "Etymology as argument" (6/18/05, yesterday one link removed in the selected readings to "Genealogy") and I have to admit that I am so guilty of this. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002248.html
Chas Belov said,
September 23, 2024 @ 4:09 pm
Hoping the phrase can't also be applied to climate change.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 23, 2024 @ 4:28 pm
better would be
就是这样的，历史跟竞赛一样，免不了有很多垃圾时间的。
"So it is — in history, as in sports (or "[athletic] competition"…), there is always a healthy portion of garbage time." OR other solution
fun article to read though it should be said that a perception of historical "garbage time" is contingent on one's / a community's psychic attachment to the pertinent ethnonationalist fiction, whether "China", "the USSR", "Amurkuh", or whatever
J.W. Brewer said,
September 23, 2024 @ 4:32 pm
In the sports context "garbage time" is not evaluated in hindsight but judged in real time because everyone can see the scoreboard and make rational assessments about what range of outcomes do or do not remain reasonably possible given how close to the end of the game it is. It was, by contrast, not clear contemporaneously to most Western governments as of 1979 and thereafter that the Soviet Union had already inevitably lost and we could afford to ease up and send in the second-string players – although it is true that the scoring streak the Soviets had been on for most of the Seventies did stop after 1979.
Chester Draws said,
September 23, 2024 @ 5:10 pm
I think it was pretty clear to most people inside the Soviet Union in the 1980s that the system was corrupt and no longer had much promise of a brighter future. People went through the motions, but few really believed any more, the corruption was just too obvious.
The problem with the sporting analogy is that sports has a time limit, but empires can linger for centuries even when it is clear that they are failing. The Ottoman Empire, for example.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 23, 2024 @ 5:48 pm
@Chester Draws: Sports not only have time-limits or some loose equivalent (e.g. baseball and tennis are examples where there's no clock running), they have an agreed scoring system. Thinking the Soviet Union should be have been scored on "improving the lives of residents of the USSR" rather than "improving its geostrategic position vis-a-vis the U.S. by acquiring more third-world allies and/or vassal states" might be a controversial claim! If you'd aired it too publicly back then in the wrong place you might have found yourself in the gulag.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 23, 2024 @ 5:50 pm
Well yeah the analogy is imperfect in many ways. The funny part is the idea that players in histories might enter emotional states resembling those of (losing?) garbage time athletes who can "hope only to get things wrapped up in more or less respectable fashion / with their dignities reasonably intact" 只能求尽量体面地收场而已.
Christopher J. Henrich said,
September 23, 2024 @ 9:03 pm
When I post on Language Log, I usually feel that I must say, or imply, that I am not a linguist. I'm not a historian either. But I think nk that I do have some shareable thoughts on the subject of this thread.
1. The analogy of a football (or other) game to the history of a country is not very close. In particular, the history never really comes to an end. Stuff just keeps on happening.
2. Sometimes, something really big does come to a sudden and messy end; and looking back one thinks that that was inevitable for some years prior to the debacle. But I can't believe in a "garbage time," even for something as big as the Chinese Empire, that could
last from 1587 to – when? 1912? 1949? the death of Mao? or even some time in the future. Nuts!
Peter Grubtal said,
September 24, 2024 @ 2:36 am
Is this historicism? If so, where's Popper?
AntC said,
September 24, 2024 @ 3:08 am
@Yves Refuse Time [I note your capitalisation.]
The conventional phrase is Garbage time [so capitalised], as Prof Mair uses.
Your post includes many such oddities that lead me to suspect you're an AI. In which case I'd like to draw both Profs Mair and Liberman's attention, to defend their claims how good AI is these days.
Victor Mair said,
September 24, 2024 @ 6:45 am
Starting a few months ago, I have had extensive interaction with Yves offline, and always thought of him as exceedingly precocious, without preconceptions, and eager to learn. He was diffident, and voracious in absorbing whatever I told him. He pointedly picked my brains, but after a while, he seemed to become increasingly competent and confident, till the point where he began to make his own posts on Language Log, which frankly surprised me.. And they seem to be getting better and better.
BTW, one thing I queried him about during the early days was his unusual background, which did not fit that of a typical academician, but did have a strong linguistic focus.
David Marjanović said,
September 24, 2024 @ 9:05 am
Wertstoffe doesn't really mean "resources". It's a complete neologism that emphasizes recycling by rebranding garbage as "value/worth substances".
Ah, that makes sense.
AntC said,
September 24, 2024 @ 7:47 pm
Thank you Prof Mair. Then welcome Yves.
Curiously, for 垃圾时间 DeepL gives 'rubbish time' (it does offer 'garbage time' as an alternative), whereas GTranslate gives 'garbage time'.
Neither offers 'Refuse time. And there's good reason that's not the fixed phrase, because 'refuse' is a homograph for the verb form. I can imagine 'to refuse time' might mean something.
Whether or not 'Garbage time' is the best choice of words, that has become the common phrase; it's what the o.p. used; so replies should follow along. Using 'Refuse Time' suggests a (poor) translation engine is involved.
Philip Taylor said,
September 26, 2024 @ 4:51 am
« Whether or not 'Garbage time' is the best choice of words, that has become the common phrase; it's what the o.p. used; so replies should follow along » — unconvinced. If a native speaker of <Am.E> were to make a contribution here using terms such as "auto", "fender" and "sidewalk", would you expect a Briton to use the same terms in his reply, or would you expect him to automatically substitute the <Br.E> equivalents "car", "bumper" and "pavement" ? For me, a Briton, "garbage" is a primarily American term, the British equivalent being "rubbish". Although, to be honest, neither "garbage time" nor "rubbish time" are in my idiolect, presumably originating in sports with which I am unfamiliar.
Yves Rehbein said,
September 27, 2024 @ 4:55 am
@ David Marjanović, that only proves my point if lājī 垃圾 is a euphemism and "garbage time" clearly is a dysphemism, it's the Euphemism treadmill.
Michael Watts said,
September 30, 2024 @ 6:56 am
Are these terms intentional uses of the other side's normal lexicon? As a native speaker of AmE, I would use "car", "bumper", and "sidewalk", assuming I'm talking about a sidewalk. "Pavement" would apply equally well to the material of the sidewalk or the material of the street.
I know "fender" only through its existence in the fixed item fender bender, a collision of minor severity, and I would roundly reject the idea that it might be possible to refer to a car as an "auto".
I note that, looking at the wikipedia article for "Fender (vehicle)", it clearly indicates that the fenders are those parts of the car that surround the wheels, which is not what would be referred to as the "bumpers"; the bumpers stick out in front and behind.
It also says that the British equivalent of "fenders" is "wings".