China will displace 9,000 villagers to build $184 million telescope for alien life search

boing
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Which is basically a perfect working definition of xenophobia!

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leave them there, pay them a wage to stare, every night, at a spot in the sky !

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Re: names for rural folk- Not too long ago I heard my mom use the term “country cousin”, and it kinda made me laugh a little in a Montgomery Burns’ quaint terminology kind of way.

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I don’t know that villager has much of a universal negative connotation among Chinese. In my experience, Chinese people are not shy about expressing their feelings about people they have disdain for. Villager is a lot more ambiguous than, say, 土包子.

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Indeed. Just as in English, there’s no shortage of creative slurs people can use to really make their dislike clear.

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Robo-translates as “bumpkin” or “clodhopper” so I’m dying to know if there’s a literal meaning! I’m suspecting it won’t be “relative of an inanimate excrescence” (bump-kin) or “one who jumps about in dirt” (clod-hopper). Do you know the etymology?

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Clod-hopper is actually pretty close. The most direct translation would probably be something like son of a dirt packer. A more nuanced translation would be someone descended from people who live on dirt floors. Basically it’s a slur for a poor rural person or someone born to poor rural people. Etymology is a little different in Mandarin and other logogram based languages. Asking for the etymology of a word is often like asking for the etymology of a whole phrase in Romance languages.

Source: wife is a translator.

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So, literally, it’s ‘dirt bun,’ or something like that. The first character means earth or dirt, often also used to connote something that is unrefined. The second two characters stand for a steamed bun, something like you might get in an asian restaurant that they call ‘bao,’ or ‘humbao,’ or ‘baozi,’ baozi being the mandarin pronunciation of 包子.

Another interpretation could be like, bag of dirt (or dirtbag?). I have never actually talked to a native speaker about it, but always assumed the bun one, because it seems the colorful sort of insult that Chinese is full of. I could be wrong. I agree with GF that Chinese etymology is often murky and contentious.

Bumpkin, someone who doesn’t understand city ways, and comes off as awkward and unsophisticated to the supposedly superior city folk, I think is a really good translation.

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