PUA
This is something I was going to write about in the early part of December, 2023, but got sidetracked by too many other things. Now I'm going through my e-mail clutter to clean out old messages that I had neglected to take care of back then. At that time, more than half a year ago, "PUA" was still very popular. Although speech fashions change rapidly in China, it was so viral then that I suspect it is still relevant today, so let's take a good look at it.
When I first encountered "PUA", I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it (the same sort of feeling of being at sea when I initially heard "hawk tuah"), so I started looking around for what it might mean. Clearly, from the contexts in which I was hearing it, PUA was not "Pandemic Unemployment Assistance", which was a federal and state government program back in the day.
I fairly quickly came to the realization that the term "PUA" is derived from the American English phrase “pick-up artist”. Well, I'd never heard of that either, so had to educate myself about that too.
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