PUA, part 2
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When I first encountered the Chinese expression "pua" several years ago, I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it, so I asked my students. I wrote it on the board and pronounced it according to English phonology. They laughed and told me they thought I was saying "pǔwa 普哇", whereas they pronounce it as an English letter acronym: P-U-A.
You can hear it for yourself here.
@phuongviviyam might start using PUA in English too #greenscreen #chinese #chineselanguage #chineselanguagelearning #gaslight #gaslighting
♬ original sound – viviyam
After they educated me by telling me that "pua" stands for "pick-up-artist", and what that means, I wrote the first installment of this post.
Since "pua" is still going strong in China and is picking up some new nuances, It's time for an update, which I provide by quoting these explanations by four students of this line I picked up (!) from a random video: zhǐyào wǒ méi shàng jìn xīn jiù méiyǒu rén néng pua wǒ" 只要我沒上進心 就沒有人能pua我 ("As long as I have no ambition, no one can pua me")
Xinyan
Sun Ming
PUA initially stands for Pick-up Artists, those who study and practice techniques to attract romantic partners. But in recent years it has become a Chinese slang, meaning manipulative or emotionally abusive behavior. psychological manipulation. E.g., When our bosses or toxic partners gaslight us, we can say 別pua我！We simply pronounce it as P-U-A /pi:4 + ju:1 + ei1/ (with a Chinglish tonal accent i guess lol.
Qianheng
The host in the video providng the context for the quoted line primarily addresses the "lying flat" (躺平) phenomenon among young Chinese people today (me and Sun Ming's generation!). Due to intense societal pressures, economic downturns, and employment challenges, many young people are choosing to reject the traditional hustle culture. Some criticize them for being "lazy" or "unmotivated" (which is essentially a form of "PUA"), but the reality is that the competition we face is fiercer than ever. For some, opting out of the relentless grind is seen as a way to pursue a happier, more balanced life.
Zhaofei
In sum, if I have no aspirations, no one can leverage them against me. Opt-out, dude.
Selected readings
- "PUA" (8/30/24)
- "'Lying flat' and 'Involution': passive-aggressive resistance" (6/4/21)
- "'Lying flat' and 'Buddha whatever' (part 2)" (6/24/21)
- "The growing supinity of Chinese youth" (7/11/23)
- "Acronyms in China" (11/2/19)
- "Chinese acronyms" (12/22/19)
- "VX in Chinese" (2/27/17)
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
March 28, 2025 @ 7:07 am
Surely there's a Chinese word for "psychological manipulation"?
David Marjanović said,
March 28, 2025 @ 7:23 am
…by means of manipulative or emotionally abusive behavior.
One of them is negging, of which nèihào might be phonosemantic matching: it means convincing someone they're so undesirable they'll never find a better partner than you, so you are their only hope.
I wouldn't say "romantic partners" either. It's so you can keep up when your bros brag about the number of notches on their bedposts.
M. Paul Shore said,
March 28, 2025 @ 8:12 am
I would argue that "negging" (which I've never intentionally practiced, by the way, let alone any other modern PUA-type behavior) is not necessarily as brutal as David Marjanović describes. The essential message it's supposed to convey to a woman is "You're not as great as you think you are, and I'm going to start subtly judging you before you start judging me harshly, or even start judging me at all". It's supposed to subtly turn the tables, often preemptively, on what PUA types perceive as modern women's typically harsh, ego-driven judging of men.
Note that negging isn't the same thing as gaslighting, which is making someone believe something that's untrue, often by convincing him or her that you believe it yourself. (The term originated as a reference to the 1938 play Gas Light and the 1940 and 1944 films Gaslight, which are largely about what has in consequence come to be called gaslighting. Actually, they could also be said to be about negging, though practiced by a husband against his not particularly judgmental wife and not with seduction as the aim.)
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
March 28, 2025 @ 8:16 am
Yeah, "negging" seems to fit the video's context better. The movie "Gaslight" was about a guy who tried to trick his wife into doubting her own sanity so he could have her institutionalized and take her money. In other words, he wasn't trying to "pick her up", he was trying to "put her down"/away.
Yves Rehbein said,
March 28, 2025 @ 10:25 am
@ M. Paul Shore, to me it sounds like gay sleight. Of course, one could argue that theatre and gay (in a broad sense, I should add) do go well together, the 1938 play could be coincidence, but I cannot speak from experience. Ancient Greek actors were cross dressing, that much I know.
But sleight is English: "To treat as unimportant or not worthy of attention;" To treat (someone or something) with disdain or neglect, usually out of prejudice, hatred, or jealousy;" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slight Gas, however, seems to be originally Dutch.
Biscia said,
March 28, 2025 @ 10:32 am
I’d say negging is neither gaslighting nor exactly what M. Paul Shore describes. It’s based on the idea that all women are obsessed with their own attractiveness to men, so if a man uses a back-handed compliment that implies a woman is not attractive to him, she’ll immediately forget about whether she finds him attractive and start doing her best to please him. Especially because, in PUA logic, women don’t actually care about men’s looks, intelligence, humor, etc., only about their perceived power and social status. So the more overbearing and “alpha” a man is—the more he puts her in her place—the more likely she is to fall for him.
M. Paul Shore said,
March 28, 2025 @ 12:18 pm
Yves Rehbein: Your weird comment strikes me as being a prime candidate for deletion; but since it's addressed directly to me, I'll take the trouble to answer it. If your comment gets deleted, I'd hope that this comment of mine would get deleted as well, to preserve thread coherence.
First, your implication, which I've seen other people make in other contexts over the years, that any man who seeks romantic and/or sexual connection with a woman must actually be gay, strikes me as being the kind of dogmatically contrarian, deserving-to-be-no-more-than-amateur-level psychologizing that the world has had entirely too much of during the past century-plus, from the Freudians on down, and that I'd hope we could belatedly consign to the trash heap of intellectual history in the very near future.
Second, you're conflating the two homonyms sleight and slight, which are not the same word despite the similar spellings. (On linguistic grounds I disapprove of such purely-spelling-based distinctions between liable-to-be-confused words–other examples being immanent and imminent, and autarchy and autarky>–but in literary English we're stuck with them for now. Given that the words in such pairs are often rare and/or archaic, I think the ultimate solution is to simply drop one or both words in such pairs from present-day English vocabulary.) Even given that one could argue that negging is both sleight and a slight, the two words are not the same.
And yes, the word gas is originally from Dutch, created by the Flemish scientist Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580-1644).
M. Paul Shore said,
March 28, 2025 @ 12:35 pm
Biscia: My explanation of negging wasn't inaccurate, just not as full as it could've been. I should've clarified that the ultimate goal of man-on-woman negging is to get the woman to drop her assumption that she's automatically deserving of the man's approval, and to make her feel that she needs to make some sort of effort to earn his approval. And if that effort should end up including her offering herself romantically and/or physically to the PUA, then from his point of view so be it.
Jonathan Smith said,
March 28, 2025 @ 3:39 pm
@M. Paul Shore: Both your comments — very weirdly to be very euphemistic — frame "negging" in terms of preexisting problems with women: first one says the issue is women wrongly thinking they are great; second one says the issue is women thinking they are automatically deserving of men's approval. Deep reflection is in order.
Notable is that higher degrees of gender parity tend to stymie PUAbros, cf. e.g. Denmark. I.e., the issues at issue are social issues. Thank God for the good ol' USofA /s
M. Paul Shore said,
March 28, 2025 @ 3:54 pm
Jonathan Smith: Please understand that all I'm doing is describing the PUA mentality in order to clarify what the original meaning of the term "negging" was. I'm not talking about feelings of my own. I thought my first comment made that reasonably clear. To the extent someone needs "deep reflection", it's the PUAs.
I was afraid that someone would mistakenly think I was writing in a way that reflected my personal viewpoint.
Yves Rehbein said,
March 28, 2025 @ 3:54 pm
Second, you're conflating the two homonyms sleight and slight, which are not the same word despite the similar spellings.
@ M. Paul Shore,
I am not conflating them. The difference is irrelevant to my argument, which you failed to acknowledge is relevant. The quote and citation are correct and my spelling mistake is a fluke.
First, your implication, which I've seen other people make in other contexts over the years …
Did you think that I mean homoseksueel? I reckon in the 1930s gay would not be as heavily conotated as it is today, at least not as widely known in that sense, but earlier it could include lewd practices https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/gay
Essentially you have misunderstood anything I said. Are you gay slighting me?
M. Paul Shore said,
March 29, 2025 @ 3:23 am
Yves Rehbein: Okay, I've taken a closer look at your initial comment–which I admit I originally dismissed as little more than a collection of vapid, Sprachgefühl -deficient wordplay–and am piecing together its intended "argument". So you're advocating for an alternative etymology of the expression "to gaslight [someone]", an etymology that would have nothing to do with the 1938 play Gas Light or the 1940 and 1944 movies Gaslight, but instead would go back to a hypothesized expression "to gay-slight [someone]", which you're claiming would not have meant "to slight [someone] in the manner one might expect a gay person to do" (and note that in the past there were multiple possible slangy understandings of what the phrase "gay person" might signify), but instead would have meant "to slight [someone] merrily". To which I reply, no, no, no, and no. Such an etymology is not phonetically plausible, phonologically plausible, syntactically plausible, or semantically plausible. Note, for one thing, that slighting is not the essence of gaslighting someone: rather, deception and psychological manipulation are the essence of it. The standard etymology of "to gaslight [someone]" is for all practical purposes universally understood and universally acknowledged, both by the public and by lexicographers.
Regarding your eye-dialect attempt to paint me as an ignorant hayseed for thinking that you were hinting at the sexual meaning of "gay": It was you, not I, who brought up that issue in the first place (i.e., in your initial comment), and I thought your ostensible denial of such a meaning was actually just a coy way of affirming it. My mistake. Comments in a forum like this one should not be so hard to decipher.
Ttoker said,
March 29, 2025 @ 11:27 am
Does Prof. Mair also have a Tik Tok account?
Victor Mair said,
March 29, 2025 @ 12:22 pm
No.
stephen said,
March 29, 2025 @ 6:29 pm
I associate sleight with sleight of hand, trickery. Disregarding something would be a slight. There are other meanings of course. An archaic meaning of slight is to raze something.
Robot Therapist said,
March 30, 2025 @ 5:02 am
I may be mis-remembering, but in my mind the whole "PUA" thing is very 1990s? And it was all documented in the book "The Game". Is it still around?
John Rohsenow said,
March 30, 2025 @ 4:02 pm
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
Imitation Leather [SIC]– Illustrated, September 6, 2005
by Neil Strauss (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Game-Penetrating-Secret-Society-Artists/dp/0060554738