It is perfect for Soccer pitches, rugby pitches, Camping. This is an edition of Wednesday Words, a weekly feature on language. It is an evergreen grass, resistant to heat, cold and drought, and repairs quickly from wear and tear. Mississippi Mud Lee Morse and Her Blue Grass Boys, November 1928. Ministry of Truth (n.): a nickname for any government agencies involved in censorship a reference to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four.Ĭompare fathers (v.): a metaphor for the gap between the rich and the poor, and the difficulty in closing it, as evinced by how parentage is theoretically linked to one’s current economic status. Mississippi Mud by Paul and His Gang feat Kiki Desplat was written by Harry Barris. West Korea (n.): a pejorative nickname for China, meant to suggest that it shares negative qualities with North Korea, such as repressive rulers and a lack of democracy.įifty Cent Party (n.): a nickname for alleged undercover commentators who are paid to post pro-government messages online fifty cents is their alleged rate of pay per post. Scale the wall (v): to circumvent censorship measures put in place by the Chinese government. Here’s a taste of other words and phrases in this new introduction to wordplay subversion, primarily put together by an anonymous translator: So the river crab has become the storied foe of the grass-mud horse–and, Qiang explains, anti-Communist types will say they’ve been “river-crabbed” when they’re stopped by the Great Firewall. For example: the word for harmony, a propaganda catchword, sounds much like the word for river crab. Many of the coded words and references replace similar sounding words. Find useful information, the address and the phone number of the local business. Technology known as “the Great Firewall” blocks web sites on an array of sensitive topics (democracy, for instance), while tens of thousands of government monitors and citizen volunteers regularly sweep through blogs, chat forums, and even e-mail to ensure nothing challenges the country’s self-styled “harmonious society.”Įarlier this year, the editor for the China Digital Times, Xiao Qiang, co-authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the secret tongue, explaining that metaphors allow for political conversation that would otherwise be impossible. Locate and compare lawn care in Mud River BC, Yellow Pages Local Listings. In 2009, TIME did a brief history of Chinese censorship, explaining what surfing the web is like in that part of the world: The China Digital Times has been collecting words in this sneaky lexicon and recently issued a collection of “classics,” a rundown of 71 “politically charged terms which represent netizen resistance discourse.” As University of Pennsylvania Professor Victor Mair writes on Language Log, the compilation provides a “really fine introduction to the labyrinthine world of China’s blogs and microblogs, one which would be impenetrable to outsiders without such specialized manuals to guide them on their way.” The creature’s name sounds an awful lot like a rude, four-letter instruction and your mother. Since 2009, the “grass-mud horse” has become the mascot for Chinese “netizens” using special lingo to evade and make fun of government censorship. Follow is a mythical creature who only exists because its name sounds awfully vulgar-at least in Chinese.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |