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[This is a guest post by Don Keyser]
A true tale from nearly a half century ago … prompted by reading the mox nix posting to LL.
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My first of three Beijing postings was 1976-78 to the U.S. Liaison Office. USLO was tiny — 25 total personnel (9 "substantive" [Chief, USLO; Deputy Chief, USLO; POL-3; ECON-3; Agricultural Attaché], the remainder a visa officer and secretaries, administrative support personnel, security officers, and communicators). Hence when USLO hosted a reception for a visiting US delegation or for another occasion, most of the staff attended.
Our POL secretary was bright, personable and capable. She had an M.A. So she was an asset at the receptions.
The day following one large reception in autumn 1976, we gathered in-house to compare notes. The secretary reported, suppressing laughter, that she had met an "interesting" Chinese guest — male, tall, athletic, nearly perfect English. She politely complimented him on his English proficiency, asking if he had studied abroad. No, he replied, he was self-taught (schools and universities were still closed owing to the Cultural Revolution) and tried to improve his English by listening to VOA and BBC. He paused for a moment and then asked if she might help him solve a small mystery. Of course, she said. He told her that he could understand standard English quite well, but often had trouble with slang expressions. For example, he said, he often heard Americans saying something that sounded like m****rf****r, but he had no idea what it meant. Could she enlighten him? She said it was an all-purpose word that was often an expletive or a way of making a thought more emphatic. And left it at that.
Well. Opportunities in those late Cultural Revolution days were exceedingly few, as in almost nil, for Chinese to engage in casual conversation with foreigners who were neither Romanian nor Albanian. So it was immediately obvious to all of us that this polished young man was one of the military intelligence officers assigned to listen in on English-language telephone conversations.
Ways of amusing ourselves were few in the weeks and months following the Tangshan earthquake when Beijing was basically shut down and most dependents were sent outside country until apartment buildings were again deemed safe and the threat of another devastating quake had diminished. So some of us decided to begin lacing our telephone conversations with a mixture of pig latin and (if you recall) the "-op" language (in which "China" comes out as "chop-i-nop-a" and "America" as "A-mop-e-rop-i-cop-a"). If our stalwart listener was purportedly baffled by m****rf****r, we figured that the odds of the listeners being able to handle mixed pig latin and -op language were vanishingly small. (Not that we were so stupid as to say anything sensitive over the phone in any case.).
Selected readings
January 26, 2025 @ 6:06 pm
· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and politics, Slang, Translation
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VVOV said,
January 27, 2025 @ 11:08 am
Great story, but surely one has to consider the possibility that the telephone surveillance man was simply pretending not to know the meaning of that word in order to mess with the secretary?
John Swindle said,
January 29, 2025 @ 3:41 am
I'm not sure about "motherfucker," but an authoritative English-Chinese dictionary of that era, published in Beijing, did have definitions for "fuck," "~ing," ~y," and :"fuck you Charlie." No mention was made that "fuck" could refer to sexual intercourse. As an American student of Chinese I hadn't heard "fucky" before (and haven't heard it since, although I see it's in Wiktionary).
Rodger C said,
January 30, 2025 @ 11:52 am
No mention was made that "fuck" could refer to sexual intercourse.
Is this a reflection of the contexts in which Chinese learners are expected to use English?
Rodger C said,
January 30, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
Or of the limitations of the dataset? (Political journalism?)
Philip Taylor said,
January 30, 2025 @ 2:13 pm
I can no longer remember whether the following is apocryphal or actually took place, but I remember distinctly being told of the young man whose account of the previous evening's activities made copious use of the "f" word right up to the point where he (is alleged to have) said "and then I had f*****g sexual intercourse with her".
John Swindle said,
January 30, 2025 @ 4:55 pm
My guess at the time was that whoever approved the dictionary entry was supplied with the sexual meaning but mistakenly thought it was secondary and unnecessary to include in a serious dictionary.
Rodger C said,
January 31, 2025 @ 2:21 pm
Philip Taylor: I've seen that anecdote attributed to Australian soldiers in WWII, as recorded by Yanks.