An article in today's New York Times discusses the "Grass-Mud Horse" phenomenon in China, an Internet craze fueled by censor-tweaking postings of songs and videos about a pseudo-mythical beast whose name happens to sound just like an "especially vile" obscenity in Chinese.
Unfortunately, Times writer Michael Wines couldn't get around his censors to tell us precisely what that especially vile obscenity is.
Fortunately, the folks at Language Log did.
Read more about it:
• A Dirty Pun Tweaks China's Online Censors
• The Song of the Grass-Mud Horse
• Franco-Croation Squid in Pepper Sauce
• The Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures
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Comments
OK, well, I’ve seen this article cropping up all over the net about the mythical “Grass-Mud Horse, and being a foreigner having lived in China 5 years, I get the joke, although I haven’t actually seen the “Grass-Mud Horse” blogs, I can help with translating the obscenity, which is comparable to it’s English counterpart of the same phrase “cao” is another way to say..to put it politely..procreate, “ni” means you, and ma means mother!
Plain and simple, Grass-Mud Horse is a play on words meaning the same as the English F**k your mother! There you have it
Thanks for this. This is great. Power to the people!
一楼正解
On the first floor of right answer