Gabriele de Seta has a serious, scholarly article on "Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emoji, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms" in First Monday, Volume 23, Number 9 – 3 September 2018. Here's the abstract: The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji […]
Betsy Rymes, "Translanguaging is Everywhere", Anthropology News 4/27/2018: For over three years now I’ve been keeping a blog about something I call “citizen sociolinguistics”—the work people do to make sense of everyday communication and share their sense-making with others. […] Topics range from memes and emojis, to cross-posting and Urban Dictionary, to Konglish to Singlish […]
Why would "rice rabbit" become a buzzword in China? The answer is simple: it's one of the ways that Chinese netizens try to get around the banning of #MeToo by government censors. The CCP doesn't like #MeToo because it enables women to organize and speak out against harassment and repression. "China Is Attempting To Muzzle […]
Screenshot from Nikita Kuzmin's WeChat:
Two powerful agencies of the PRC central government, Zhōnggòng zhōngyāng jìlǜ jiǎnchá wěiyuánhuì 中共中央纪律检查委员会 ("Central Commission for Discipline Inspection") and Zhōnghuá rénmín gònghéguó jiānchá bù 中华人民共和国监察部 ("People's Republic of China Ministry of Supervision"), have issued "bā xiàng guīdìng biǎoqíng bāo 八项规定表情包" ("emoticons for the eight provisions / stipulations / rules"); see also here. The biǎoqíng bāo 表情包 (lit., "expression […]
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Missed this earlier in the year: "Poop-Themed Kanji Study Book a Bestseller in Japan" nippon.com (4/21/17) Not only is there one book utilizing the theme of excrement to stimulate interest in kanji, there's a whole graded series of texts, and they're selling like hotcakes (pardon me). It doesn't hurt that there's a general fascination with […]
A lengthy, important article by Michael Erard recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine: "How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets: Do the volunteers behind Unicode, whose mission is to bring all human languages into the digital sphere, have enough bandwidth to deal with emojis too?" (10/18/17) The […]
Advertisement recently spotted by Guy Freeman in the Central, Hong Kong MTR (subway) station:
Yep, just like that. This expression is very common on the Chinese internet, messaging, chatting, etc. now, but — for those of us who are not in the know — what does it mean? I'll just give one hint: nǐ 你 means "you".
I must admit to having enjoyed the series of savage similes about quality of computer program code presented in three xkcd comic strips. They show a female character, known to aficionados as Ponytail, reluctantly agreeing to take a critical look at some code that the male character Cueball has written. Almost at first sight, she […]
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Christopher Alderton saw this flyer on his way to work a few days ago:
In a comment to this post, "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17), liuyao remarked, Interesting that 愛 to mean (romantic) love might be a modern invention. A search in Dream of the Red Chamber (which is regarded as Beijing Mandarin in 18th century) reveals that all instances of it are in fact "to like" […]
The following ghastly photographs of a rat that was caught stealing from a convenience store in Heyuan, Guangdong province have gone viral on Chinese social media. =============================================== WARNING: viewer discretion advised. The photographs following the page break may be upsetting to some readers. ===============================================