China’s Single’s Day — making and breaking the bank

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 …

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 …