New Reading Material: Swearing and Subversion!
February 11th, 2009 | View Comments
Remember when I asked for new reading material? Check out what I found on Danwei:
Meet the Grass Mud Horse (草泥馬), a rare animal that has become phenomenally popular in the past month.
The animal, whose name sounds like a common curse (操你媽), is the most famous of the Ten Legendary Beasts of Baidu, non-existent animals that were inserted into Baidu’s user-editable encyclopedia.
One of the perils of learning Chinese the way I did, where your entire exposure to the language comes from your parents and their friends, is that you don’t really learn how to swear. And now I know, “F__ your mom!”
That’s not something I could have learned from instructional text either. While 你媽 is definitely “your mom”, this is what the dictionary has for 操:
- hold; grasp
- act; do; operate
- speak (a language or dialect)
Not nearly as scandalous. If you too want to learn Chinese swears (along with some terms for genitalia and other things not used in polite conversation), head on over to Danwei. They have it set up nicely so if you mouse over the Chinese characters, you’ll get a tooltip with the pinyin pronunciation.
Not that I have any burning desire to cuss someone out in Chinese, but if you think about it, that’s kind of a dividing line between adult speech and child speech, between real fluency and mere book larnin’. If you were in the company of adult native English speakers watching, say, Fight Club, wouldn’t you think something was off if, mid-Tyler Durden rant, someone blinked and asked, all wide-eyed, “what does that mean?” Even adults who never swear themselves would know what it means, y’know?
Back to the 草泥馬 (the Grass Mud Horse, not the thing about your mother). It’s a little-known fact that Chinese people love puns and other plays on words. Virtually every word in Chinese has at least one homophone and there can be dozens. As a point of illustration, if I type “ma” into my Chinese input tool, I get 31 different characters to choose from, including 馬 (horse) and 媽 (mother). The source material for puns is rich and plentiful.
The punning around 草泥馬 didn’t just stop with the name of the subversive creature, someone turned around and made an entire song of it!
Translation and analysis of the political subtext at China Digital Times.
Yvonne posted this on February 11th, 2009 @ 5:03pm in Chinese, Culture Gaps | Permalink to "New Reading Material: Swearing and Subversion!"
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