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Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun
Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.
Watch the cnut moderators censor this fscking post for all the shirty language it contains!
Hey, mods: kiss my RSS!
I find it fittingly ironic that in a story about the nefarious Chinese censorship that the slashdot editors felt it okay to censor the expletive in question.
Yes its like that in Cantonese as well. I gave up trying to learn my wife's language when I found out that the words for Aunt and Vagina sound exactly the same to me.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As a Chinese, lemme explain some background..
The "grass-mud-horse" thingy used to appear in the Baidu Baike, Baidu's Wikipedia-like project. The Baidu Baike is widely regarded as part of government's effort to control Chinese people's source of information and a central hub of the whole "harmonization" stupidity, for Baidu is at the same side with the govn't. By creating a new webopedia it gives them more control over it. Naturally the contents in Baidu Baike are heavily censored against politically incorrect material but no one gives a shit about factual accuracy or copyright violations that's rampant there.
Some anonymous person thus put the articles for "grass-mud-horse", along with other jokes of this kind, to Baidu Baike. Unsurprisingly they stayed there for quite a long time without being removed, because there was no "political" stuff in them, even if the contents were outrageously out of touch with reality. This was seen as a punch in Baidu's face, and by extension, a joke on government's attempts to control online speech. After the "grass-mud-horse" became widely known the Baidu Baike articles were removed but the meme went wild.
So much for the background. I hope I made some points across the Great Language Barrier.. It's kinda surprising to see you guys here discussing the caonima stuff at /. ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The follies of English orthography
achieve heights of linguistic pornography
when the fish that you fry
you spell g-h-o-t-i
for pleasure instead of cryptography...