“People Insist on Using Euphemisms Such as ‘Flexible Employment,’ ‘[Workforce] Optimization,’ and ‘Delayed Employment’”

“It’s as if the phrases ‘layoffs’ and ‘unemployment’ are in some way disgraceful, so as a substitute folks insist on utilizing euphemisms akin to ‘versatile employment,’ ‘[workforce] optimization,’ ‘sluggish employment’ (additionally ‘delayed employment’), and even worse, ‘reintegrating expertise again into society.’ One other instance is stigmatizing sure forms of conduct, which supplies rise to euphemisms akin to ‘malicious homecomings,’ ‘maliciously asking for unpaid wages,’ and ‘maliciously mendacity flat.’” [Chinese]

At present’s CDT quote of the day comes from a latest essay revealed by WeChat account 码头青年 (mǎtou qīngnián, “port youth”), in regards to the methods by which varied types of euphemisms have twisted the Chinese language written language. The phrase “malicious homecomings” refers to a viral phrase from a Henan county Justice of the Peace in 2022, who promised quarantine and detention for anybody “maliciously” returning house for the Lunar New 12 months, sparking an explosion of proudly malicious feedback and even poetry. The publish from which in the present day’s quote is taken begins by railing in opposition to this 12 months’s development of utilizing wildly advanced, archaic variant characters in Lunar New 12 months’s greetings. Final week CDT translated parts of a equally themed publish by one other WeChat blogger who complained about utilizing uncommon and sophisticated variant characters to speak a reasonably boring and customary Chinese language New 12 months’s greeting:

龙行龘龘 lóng xíng dá dá

前程朤朤 qiánchéng lǎng lǎng

生活䲜䲜 shēnghuó yè yè

事业燚燚 shìyè yì yì

Might the dragon soar—

Wishing you a brilliant future,

an considerable life,

and a blazingly profitable profession! [Source]

Matou Qingnian takes that argument a step additional, noting that other than dusting off “moldy outdated characters” to indicate off one’s erudition, some euphemisms act extra perniciously to hide vital socio-economic or political issues:

Some netizens commented that this can be a regression of Chinese language language, a air pollution of the usage of language and writing, an act of cultural pretentiousness and aesthetic vulgarity. I wholeheartedly agree.

[…] As Chen Yuan, the father of Chinese language sociolinguistics, wrote in his Nineteen Eighties e-book “Language and Social Life”: “If in our each day lives, in our social lives, we encounter language that appears right, however actually conveys no linguistic info in anyway, then what good is language? That is the sort of disastrous contamination we at the moment are experiencing.” [Chinese]