People’s Daily deserves not our scorn but our patience and understanding. I make the comparison with autism with absolutely no intention of being insulting to autistic people or their family and friends, and please accept my apologies if this still sounds offensive. But maybe the proper response to People’s Daily — which has underdeveloped communication skills (despite being the official mouthpiece of the government), difficulty grasping abstract concepts, and fantasies that are simply untenable in the real world — should be with tolerance, composure, and encouragement?
Via SCMP:
The Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily has been waging a war on the direct use of non-Chinese words such as “iPhone” and “Wi-fi” in the Chinese language. The paper has published two editorials in the past week, claiming that “mingling foreign words in Chinese has damaged the Chinese language’s purity and undermined communication”.
Perhaps we should not, due to PD’s autism, compare it to an animal. They might attack the New York Times, the Relevant Organs, Sina, porn, The Big Bang Theory, the English language, and everything enjoyable in the world, but they’re not so different from you and I. Like us, they are trying to form patterns out of and stitch sense into this weird and wondrous thing called life. They’re trying, damn it. We should meet them halfway.
The concerns come at a time when popular English terms and expressions have become more commonly used in the daily life of the Chinese than ever, as they embrace western cultural products such as Hollywood blockbusters and British TV dramas like Downton Abbey and Sherlock.
Nod.
The articles question why the Chinese language had to include English abbreviations while similar terms borrowed from other languages, for example “kung fu”, are always translated into English letters in English-speaking nations.
I like kung fu. You like kung fu. You’re not so bad, People’s Daily. We’re going to survive.
Beijing’s call to ban foreign words in Chinese media meets with mocking satire (SCMP)
“We should meet them halfway.”
No.
Not to be a “stick in the mud”, because I have no problem with comparisons like these, it’s simply that the characterization of autism is incorrect; autism is more akin to a disorder borne of unusual modes of information acquisition and schema formation than it is incompatible with the current societal models of imprinting than any sort of inability to grasp matters abstract.
A better comparison would have been the Ian Agnew character from that one episode of Monk (sorry, I could not find a video, but the script should suffice): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650623/quotes
Ah, mangled part of the sentence, the “than it” of the fourth line should be “which”. Apologies for any confusion.
I feel my brain cells dying if I ventured on the China Daily website.