Language

KUSO

If you walk around Taipei these days you’ll be sure to see the word KUSO written in big letters all over the place. For instance, this summer there was a city-sponsored cultural festival in Ximending called “KUSO Ximending.”

Kuso西門町 July 11-15, 2007 on Flickr - Photo Sharing! - Mozilla Firefox

But what does “KUSO” mean? Luckily, Wikipedia is there to help us out:

Kuso is the term used in the Chinese world for the internet culture that generally includes all types of camp and parody. The Mandarin Chinese word ègǎo (simplified Chinese: 恶搞; traditional Chinese: 惡搞, literally meaning “reckless doings”) is often used as a synonym or description of its meaning. In Japanese, kuso (糞,くそ, kuso?) means shit, and is often uttered as an interjection. It is also used to describe outrageous matters and objects of poor quality. This definition of kuso was brought into Taiwan in around 2000 by young people who frequent Japanese websites and quickly became an internet phenomenon, spreading to Hong Kong and subsequently the rest of China.

The range of meanings is pretty wide, with some people applying it to anything stupidly-funny, and others restricting it more narrowly to internet and manga culture. You can get a sense of the range of meanings by looking a Flickr photos tagged KUSO.

UPDATE: I forgot to credit the inspiration for this post: Fred’s post about a TV show called KUSO Kitchen.

Ivory Tower vs. Real World

[Cross-posted at Savage Minds]

Flickr Photo Download: CT - New Haven - Yale University: Harkness Tower - Mozilla Firefox

In our discussions about anthropologists in the military the term “ivory tower” has come up again and again, as has its antipode, “the real world.” These terms work rhetorically to oppose academic elitism and detachment against the difficult moral choices one must make in everyday life. A couple of things really bother me about the way these words are used:

First, it seems that “the real world” is always invoked when someone feels the need to justify decisions made which will help the elite. The “real world” requires us to support military dictators, cut jobs, pollute the environment, etc. You almost never hear someone talk about how in the “real world” we must build up the institutions of democracy, support unions, or protect our natural resources. Why are these choices less “real”?

Second, the labeling of anthropologists as ivory tower intellectuals is just odd. Most anthropologists I know are very much engaged in the real-world problems of their informants, love nothing more than to be in the field, and many, many, anthropologists are politically active both at home and abroad. It is true that anthropologists tend to shun the role of “public intellectual” and engagement with mainstream US politics, but they are very active in a large variety of other ways.

Third, it is odd that academics are accused of being “ivory tower intellectuals” precisely at the moment that are engaging politically in the US public sphere. To be passive subjects of military policy would be less “ivory tower” than to speak out against it?

Fourth, I always hated the term “the real world.” Of all the jobs I’ve had in my life – and I’ve done a little of everything, from selling ice cream, to bar-tending, etc. – my experience in corporate america was the least “real” of them all. People in management positions were all white and played solitaire on their computer half the day, when they weren’t gossiping, while minority employees worked their asses off answering phones and sweeping the floor. These privileged yuppies had no idea about the world outside their protected suburban enclaves, and yet they are considered as having jobs in the “real world” because they earn more money?

The fact that the real world involves difficult moral judgments should be a reason for serious academic debate about the basis for those judgments, not a reason for silencing that debate.

(Photo by wallyg)

Asynchronicity

I never liked team sports, I never liked playing the dozens, I never liked being put on the spot … Its not that I’m introverted – I’m not. I’m just not “quick-witted” (or at least not as quick as I’d like to be). Some people love talking on the phone, love chat rooms, love instant messaging, etc. but others prefer their communication out of sync. For them there is e-mail, blogging, forums, and now … Twitter.

Asynchronous communication allows you to check in and check out on your own time. The conversation is a stream into which you can choose to dip your toes or go for a swim, or just gaze upon from a distance, depending on your mood.

Some people feel overwhelmed by the river of information flowing by. They feel the need to respond to everything, or shut it off completely. This is because they haven’t yet learned that you don’t need to read everything, respond to everything, cognitively process everything that is said or written. For them Twitter is simply a distraction.

Perhaps. But perhaps Twitter is actually less distracting than a phone call, IM, or even an e-mail which demands a response. You don’t need to respond to a Tweet. Not if you don’t want to.

Or at least I don’t think you do. I just downloaded Twitterific and started using it today. I’m not yet sure how I’ll use it. It might be an alternative to chat, or simply a way of keeping track of how I spend my time. Perhaps I will end up integrating it into my website in some way … In any case, I like the idea and I’m going to play with it for a while. So far, the only person I know who Tweets is Ilya. If you read this blog and have a Twitter account, let me know.

Bhojpuri

It is already old news, having been reported in the BBC over a year ago, but I just learned that Hindi movies are on the way out. With is focus on big budget (“multi crore“) spectaculars aimed at the transnational Indian audience (NRIs), Bollywood seems to have lost its way with viewers in India’s heartland. They have turned to films produced in the Bhojpuri language, which is related to Hindi, but retains is own distinctive characteristics.

With an audience of over two hundred million speakers in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Bhojpuri films are able to earn enough money to lure some of the top Bollywood stars, including the “Big B” himself, Amitabh Bachchan. While the BBC emphasizes the emphasis on “marriage and family,” my friend from Bihar was telling me that there might be a more radical reason for the popularity of these films, as they express the dissatisfaction of rural Indians – a topic that was popular in the Bollywood films of the 1970s, the only Bollywood films which are still watched in these areas.

XMas & (C)han(n)uk(k)a(h)

One of my students asked why Christmas was spelled X-mas? Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

The word “Christ” and its compounds, including “Christmas”, have been abbreviated for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern “Xmas” was commonly used. “Christ” was often written as “XP” or “Xt”; there are references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as far back as 1021 AD. This X and P arose as the uppercase forms of the Greek letters χ and ρ), used in ancient abbreviations for Χριστος (Greek for “Christ”), and are still widely seen in many Eastern Orthodox icons depicting Jesus Christ. The labarum, an amalgamation of the two Greek letters rendered as ☧, is a symbol often used to represent Christ in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian Churches

My students also pointed out that in Chinese there are two alternatives for Christmas: 聖誕節 Shèngdànjié (lit. “Holy Birthday”) or 耶誕節 Yēdànjié which more specifically refers to Jesus (耶穌 Yēsū). Until recently Christmas was a national holiday in Taiwan, but officially it was listed as being a day off for “Constitution Day” not because of the religious holiday. Of course, the fact that Chiang Kai-shek was christian and that the KMT government had major economic and political support from Christian groups in the US meant that there was a strong reason to have an official holiday on that day, whatever it is called. Even though it is no longer a national holiday (scrapped to make room for the five day work week), one can’t escape awful Christmas music (made even worse in local covers) when shopping in Taiwan as businesses have latched on to the holiday as a way to promote sales. And because most Aborigines are Christian, the Christmas spirit is especially strong here on the East coast.

On a related note, Language Log asks how do you spell that Jewish holiday? I never realized there were so many options!

However you spell it, happy holidays!

XMas & (C)han(n)uk(k)a(h)

One of my students asked why Christmas was spelled X-mas? Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

The word “Christ” and its compounds, including “Christmas”, have been abbreviated for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern “Xmas” was commonly used. “Christ” was often written as “XP” or “Xt”; there are references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as far back as 1021 AD. This X and P arose as the uppercase forms of the Greek letters χ and ρ), used in ancient abbreviations for Χριστος (Greek for “Christ”), and are still widely seen in many Eastern Orthodox icons depicting Jesus Christ. The labarum, an amalgamation of the two Greek letters rendered as ☧, is a symbol often used to represent Christ in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian Churches

My students also pointed out that in Chinese there are two alternatives for Christmas: 聖誕節 Shèngdànjié (lit. “Holy Birthday”) or 耶誕節 Yēdànjié which more specifically refers to Jesus (耶穌 Yēsū). Until recently Christmas was a national holiday in Taiwan, but officially it was listed as being a day off for “Constitution Day” not because of the religious holiday. Of course, the fact that Chiang Kai-shek was christian and that the KMT government had major economic and political support from Christian groups in the US meant that there was a strong reason to have an official holiday on that day, whatever it is called. Even though it is no longer a national holiday (scrapped to make room for the five day work week), one can’t escape awful Christmas music (made even worse in local covers) when shopping in Taiwan as businesses have latched on to the holiday as a way to promote sales. And because most Aborigines are Christian, the Christmas spirit is especially strong here on the East coast.

On a related note, Language Log asks how do you spell that Jewish holiday? I never realized there were so many options!

However you spell it, happy holidays!

Casualty of War

On December 12th, Stephen Colbert’s “Word” was ” Casualty of War.” You can watch it online here, but Colbert’s impeccable logic is so well crafted that I wanted to share this transcript (the text in brackets represent the text which appears in the on-screen box):

Now I was burning the Iraq Study Group report the other night and as I was about tear out page 94, I read this quote: …”there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq…On one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.” This underreporting of the violence is terrible. Nation, we must fake these numbers lower! 93 is still sad, if you’re making up a number, why not 78? Or eleven? Or Zero!? Now the whine-a-nistas are gonna stay: But Stephen, you’re telling the government to lie to the American people! (Stay the course) Wrong! No, I’m just telling them to report the facts less. (De-facto leadership) You see the administration hasn’t been counting road side bombs or mortar attacks unless they harm U.S. personnel. (If an Iraqi falls in the woods…) And they haven’t been counting the killing of Iraqi’s if they can’t determine the source of the attack. I mean, who knows where that bullet came from? (Reagan administration?)

… Clearly the one thing we cannot do is leave (Troops just starting to get armor) because then Iraq will explode into even more violent chaos. But we will leave if the American people keep hearing about these casualties. So saying there no casualties is the only way to prevent greater casualties, therefore nation, it’s not a lie to say fewer Iraqis were killed than were actually killed, because by doing so we’re stopping more Iraqis from being killed in the future. Every lie we tell now will become truth then, but only if we have the courage not to tell the truth now.

Deaf Video

Teresa at Making Light has a great post about how deaf people are using YouTube:

Why did it not occur to me that the signing deaf would be using YouTube as a public forum? This is transformational. Many of them aren’t comfortably fluent in written language. For many more, sign is and always will be their first language. YouTube gives them an easy, expressive, unmediated channel for many-to-many communication.

Via MeFi, which has some more discussion.

Khol

I’d like to briefly link to two great discussions about the origins of Taiwanese vegetable names:

Prince Roy discusses the origins of the Taiwanese word for “cabbage” which is quite different from the rest of the Chinese speaking world. Here is a summary from Language Hat:

There is apparently a popular theory that the word [高麗菜] (which a commenter renders as “Gao Li Cai”) derives from the name of Korea, but much more likely to me seems the idea that it’s a borrowing from a Germanic language (cf. English cole, German Kohl)…

And there is this older post about “A菜“ or “the ‘A’ vegetable” over at Doubting to Shuo, where it is generally agreed that it is of Hoklo (Taiwanese) origin.

Generally, when ordering dinner in Taiwan, one orders a “green vegetable” 青菜 and is given a choice between these two, as well as “cabbage mustard” 芥藍菜 (jièláncài), and a “water spinach” 空心菜 (kōngxīncài). The exact choice usually depends on what is fresh and in season. I’m good to go with any of them as they’re always tasty!

Load More