Newspeak makes goodthink!
3 Likes
They just want to be sure the context matches the japes.
6 Likes
Site of the next Occupy protest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_Ying_Pun
1 Like
As I grow older, I feel like the world is gearing up for a joke whose punchline I canât hope to discern.
1 Like
woe to the smart masses
who submit to the dim some
10 Likes
Andy Zaltzman does a nice bun run on China: http://thebuglepodcast.com/bugle-280-on-the-wai-out
This will go over about as well as banning guns in the U.S. Happiness is a worn pun, after all.
For one, it would be impossible to celebrate many Chinese holidays without puns.
Also, during Chinaâs imperial days, the rulers and their bureaucrats communicated with each other using a formal scholarly dialect that was nearly unintelligible to commoners. A big part of the appeal of Mao, Zhou En-lai and their student activist compatriots is that they wrote all their essays using the conversational dialect spoken on the streets.
Banning linguistic flexibility seems like a return to the Qing Dynasty, when there was a distinct intellectual separation between the people and their government.
4 Likes
Ha! I was just thinking that the Chinese govât would be making a special trip to Andy Zaltzmanâs house so they could shut down one of the worldâs largest pun sources. Lock your doors, Andy!
Oh, shenanigans may belong in its own category. Lemme explain.
One idle day I was scrolling through the digital cable to see if weâd been accidentally given any new channels. (This would happen on occasion. Sometimes Comcastâs incompetence could be beneficial.) I got to the porn channels and it occurred to me, I wonder how the menu system handles describing these moviesâ non-existent plots. So I looked at the descriptions. A few of the films did have enough plot to synopsize, but most of them simply refer to the performers âgetting up to shenanigans.â To me, the wordâs never been the same since.
6 Likes
'Bite the wax tadpole!"
2 Likes
Evil Shenanigans!
2 Likes
Youâll get the same impression with lots of languages.
Your link to the grass mud horse song is broken. Grass mud horse is a homophone for âfuck your mother.â After it took off on the web, Ai Wei Wei took this picture of a grass mud horse covering his middle. The accompanying text read âGrass mud horse covers the middleâ which is a homophone for âfuck your mothers communist party central committee.â They arrested and imprisoned him shortly thereafter.
6 Likes
The problem is, after willfully failing to understand what you mean when you make a slight error, they have the gall to claim that jĂ sounds like jĂș or bÄ sounds like fÄ. No it doesnât, not if you donât understand that by saying ShÄnyĂ ng I want cycling directions to the large city about 100km away (ShÄnyĂĄng) rather than the province on the other side of China (XÄ«njiĂ ng). Sometimes the process of mastering Chinese feels like this:
2 Likes
Iâm all for free speech and all that, but honestly sometimes the headlines from the New York Post make me wish we could ban puns hereâŠ
You can take my pun out of my cold, dead hands.
At least you donât have a Han pun.
4 Likes
Did someone ask for a Han pun?
12 Likes
Damn, you ruined it! Spoonerisms are not puns, but now the central committee will be on the lookout for them.
4 Likes
5 Likes
My children speak fluent German, so this is their personal favorite:
8 Likes
