{"id":30922,"date":"2017-02-09T13:41:20","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T18:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=30922"},"modified":"2017-02-09T13:41:20","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T18:41:20","slug":"new-years-massacre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=30922","title":{"rendered":"New Year's massacre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Boris Kootzenko spotted this truly bizarre banner at a service area on the highway leading west from Shanghai in Anhui Province:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/nanjing.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/nanjing.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" \/><\/a><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The theme of the poster is \"hu\u00edji\u0101 gu\u00f2ni\u00e1n \u56de\u5bb6\u8fc7\u5e74\" (\"returning home to celebrate the New Year\").\u00a0 That phrase is written in very large red characters across the center of the upper half of the banner.\u00a0 For some unknown reason, it is then repeated in smaller white characters inside red squares, followed by an apostrophe, or perhaps that's a stray closing single quotation mark that is missing its matching opening quotation mark.<\/p>\n<p>The twelve medium sized black characters in three groups beneath the right side of the huge red characters wish travellers a safe and smooth journey, which is perfectly normal, but the twelve smaller characters beneath the four white characters in red blocks to the left consist of one more iteration of \"hu\u00edji\u0101 gu\u00f2ni\u00e1n \u56de\u5bb6\u8fc7\u5e74\" (\"returning home to celebrate the New Year\") and a wish for safe and \"harmonious\" (that's a code word left over from the time of President <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hu_Jintao\">Hu Jintao<\/a>) spring festival transport (ch\u016bny\u00f9n \u6625\u8fd0), the latter expression clumsily repeated in close succession.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/nanjing3.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The very small English wording (\"The 67th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China\") beneath the twelve characters just discussed have nothing to do with the Chinese text and are completely irrelevant to the New Year celebration.<\/p>\n<p>The three lines of small characters on the bottom right contain a lot of blather about the construction of a new socialist countryside, and are also unrelated to the spring festival and travelling home to celebrate the New Year.<\/p>\n<p>But the most utterly bewildering and preposterous words on the banner are these:\u00a0 \"ON <span class=\"aBn\" tabindex=\"0\" data-term=\"goog_1890615199\"><span class=\"aQJ\">DECEMBER 13<\/span><\/span>, THE NANJING MASSACRE MEMORIAL DAY\".<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/nanjing2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/nanjing2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"475\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That is completely inappropriate in the context of the festive atmosphere surrounding the celebration of the New Year.\u00a0 The only conceivable explanation I can come up with for how it happened is that they recycled some old English text they had lying around, thinking, \"Hey, we ought to have something for the w\u0101igu\u01d2r\u00e9n \u6b6a\u679c\u4ec1 ('crooked nuts') &#8212; a bad pun for w\u00e0igu\u00f3r\u00e9n \u5916\u570b\u4eba ('foreigners) &#8212; who don't know any Chinese, so we might as well educate them while we're at it.\u00a0 Since our Chinese compatriots don't know English, they won't care what those funny letters say anyway.\"<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the reason for these blunders, the local propaganda office needs a new poster maker.<\/p>\n<p>[Thanks to Fangyi Cheng and Yixue Yang]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Boris Kootzenko spotted this truly bizarre banner at a service area on the highway leading west from Shanghai in Anhui Province:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,16,173,239,259],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-culture","category-language-and-politics","category-language-and-tourism","category-language-and-travel","category-signs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30922"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30971,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30922\/revisions\/30971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}