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Chinese censors take a wong turn on puns

by on08 December 2014



Han them over to the censors

The Chinese government is cracking down on puns and wants no pun behind its Great Wall. Chinese culture is full of puns, but the country’s print and broadcast watchdog has ruled that there is nothing funny about them and they will be banned from the interwebs.

Anyone who hoped that Chinese autocracy was Mel Ting before consumer capitalism will be disappointed as the watchdog claimed that puns breaches the law on standard spoken and written Chinese, makes promoting cultural heritage harder and may mislead the public. Apparently puns confuse children and everyone knows that children need to be protected from humour at all costs. Instead children should be watching Party Political speeches or American situation comedy we guess. Slack use of casual alteration of idioms risks nothing less than “cultural and linguistic chaos”, the watchdog barked.

Chinese is perfectly suited to puns because it has so many homophones, although quite how the sexuality of users of white iPhones has anything to do with it confuses us.

“Idioms are one of the great features of the Chinese language and contain profound cultural heritage and historical resources and great aesthetic, ideological and moral values,” it added. The government is full of Idioms, many of whole drew up the laws.

The examples given which were very similar to those issued by the BBC in the 1960s banning phrases like “winter drawers in” include a tourism promotion campaign, tweaking the characters used in the phrase jin shan jin mei – perfection – has turned it into a slogan translated as “Shanxi, a land of splendours”. In another case, replacing a single character in ke bu rong huan has turned “brook no delay” into “coughing must not linger” for a medicine advert.

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