Congratulations to China entrepreneur and mega-millionaire MA Yun of Alibaba, who has a new title and a new pic to go with it: Founder of Bankrupt Broads* Day The pic went viral a couple days before Nov 11 (11-11), a date which has become a world-class shopping orgy whose single-day online sales for Ma, through his Taobao and T-Mall online …
How many names for Chairman Mao? Chinese personal naming traditions from “nursing names” to “Stupid”
For many generations, Chinese families have taken great pains in picking names for their children, fearing that “if the name is not correct, the words will not ring true” — a poorly chosen name will doom the child to ill fortune. Some of the painstaking care of naming can be seen by breaking down in the idea of “mingzi” 名字, …
Pube names II — connotation is everything
As mentioned before, we chose donkey name as the best term for a “disparaging name that doesn’t hurt your brand”. We’d also considered pube name (borrowing from 屌丝 diǎo sī = literally “pubic hair”), but in the end we dropped it for being a bit too vulgar for permanent usage. Now, though, the “diaosi = pube / loser” meme seems to be reaching deeper into the …
Lady’s day — the holiday with the problematic name
International Women’s Day came and went about a month ago, March 8. If you are living in the US, you could be forgiven for having missed it — the holiday doesn’t have much pull there, as I remember it. But here in China you can’t miss it. International Women’s Day everywhere. TV, subway posters, billboards… The holiday has taken on …
Being Microsoft
All I can think is that Steve Ballmer had a Bing fetish? Or maybe they’d spent gazillions on the domain name? Or Microsoft had not a single Chinese speaker within three degrees of separation from the board room? Yes, the leading paragraph is all uptalk, which I don’t generally do. The point of the diffident uptalk is that we can …
Baidu the Girly Du
A case study in donkey name reaction So far we’ve only talked about donkey names for foreign brands , but China’s mocking netizens have never limited their targets to foreign-owned enterprises. Baidu, the 800 pound gorilla of Chinese search, was slapped with “Dùniáng” (度娘) a few years back when netizens got upset about its forum practices.* How to translate Dùniáng? It’s …
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