Evading the censors with a bit of math – Yakexi

May 35th. It may look like a typo to you, but it is a real thing on the Chinese internet. It is one among a long list of code words used by netizens referring to June 4th 1989, when the Chinese government brutally cracked down the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Nearly 30 years later, people use courage, creativity and a bit of math skills to commemorate this tragedy.

China is home to nearly 800 million internet users and an ever more powerful censorship machine, locked in a linguistic game of cat-and-mouse. May 35th (wǔ yuè sānshíwǔ rì 五月三十五日) originated in the early days of Chinese social media.

Chinese word puzzles - Nick Stember

Can you read this?

🐎🐎🐯🐯

This is an example of “See the Picture, Guess the Phrase” (kàn tú cāi chéngyǔ 看图猜成语), a kind of Pictionary for language nerds. If we translate the emoji into Mandarin we get “horse horse tiger tiger”… or mǎmǎhūhū 马马虎虎, which means “careless” or “so-so,” depending on the context.

My own path to this wonderful corner of the Chinese internet started with a simple, seemingly unrelated question: Are there Chinese crossword puzzles? How would that even work?

Which way does the compass point? – Anne Henochowicz

Back in 2013, Sam Duncan posed an etymological question on an old collective, the Anthill, that turns out to be a scientific and cultural question:

When I first learned the word for compass, “south-pointing needle” (zhǐnánzhēn 指南针), I thought: That’s weird, why isn’t it “north-pointing needle” (zhǐběizhēn 指北针)? I read somewhere that the reason the needle points south is because the ocean is generally to the south in ancient China. Does anyone know if this is true?

When I looked it up the other night, I discovered that people also say zhibeizhen. There don’t seem to be any obvious usage differences between the two. Baidu gives me 29,300,000 hits for zhinanzhen, and 2,720,000 for zhibeizhen, so I guess the latter isn’t used that often.

You’ll find “north-pointing needle” in the dictionary, but not really anywhere else. Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with the Earth’s magnetic field in China. (Or with Chinese compasses – they invented them, after all.) And of course, all compasses point both north and south – each end of the needle is pulled toward one pole or the other. But there’s more to the “south-pointing needle” than arbitrary choice.

Move over French fries, for Trump little crisp strips – Victor Mair

Chef Jon seems to be very fond of king trumpet mushrooms. They occur as an ingredient in three of his dishes on this menu. As might be expected, in the Chinese names of two of these three dishes, the word gū 菇 (mushroom) appears, but in the third it does not.  Instead, in the latter, it is called simply Chuānpǔ 川普 (Trump), with nary a mention of an equivalent for "-et" nor for "mushroom."

The name of this dish in Mandarin is Chuānpǔ xiǎo cuìtiáo 川普小脆條, which Chef Jon calls "Crispy King Trumpet Mushroom" in English, but which may more literally be translated as "Trump little crisp strips."