Chinese government wants to ban puns

Newspeak makes goodthink!

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They just want to be sure the context matches the japes.

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Site of the next Occupy protest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_Ying_Pun

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As I grow older, I feel like the world is gearing up for a joke whose punchline I can’t hope to discern.

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woe to the smart masses
who submit to the dim some

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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 China’s 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.

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Ha! I was just thinking that the Chinese gov’t would be making a special trip to Andy Zaltzman’s house so they could shut down one of the world’s 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 we’d been accidentally given any new channels. (This would happen on occasion. Sometimes Comcast’s incompetence could be beneficial.) I got to the porn channels and it occurred to me, I wonder how the menu system handles describing these movies’ 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 “getting up to shenanigans.” To me, the word’s never been the same since.

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'Bite the wax tadpole!"

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Evil Shenanigans!

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You’ll 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 “fuck your mother.” 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 “Grass mud horse covers the middle” which is a homophone for “fuck your mothers communist party central committee.” They arrested and imprisoned him shortly thereafter.

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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 bā sounds like fā. No it doesn’t, not if you don’t understand that by saying ShěnyĂ ng I want cycling directions to the large city about 100km away (ShěnyĂĄng) rather than the province on the other side of China (XÄ«njiĂ ng). Sometimes the process of mastering Chinese feels like this:

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I’m all for free speech and all that, but honestly sometimes the headlines from the New York Post make me wish we could ban puns here


You can take my pun out of my cold, dead hands.

At least you don’t have a Han pun.

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Did someone ask for a Han pun?

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Damn, you ruined it! Spoonerisms are not puns, but now the central committee will be on the lookout for them.

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My children speak fluent German, so this is their personal favorite:

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