Comments on: WT_? Linguistic Taboos

By: David Cowhig

David Cowhig — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:59:45 +0000

Fish (yu) is a homonym for surplus (yu), not fortune. In China some buildings skip the fourth floor since four (si) is a homonym for death (si). Some internationally minded Chinese architects skip both the fourth and the thirteenth floors. Numerology is certainly in the background in China, but then some westerners worry about 13 and Friday the Thirteenth. Chinese say giving people a clock is bad (their life is ticking away) and handkerchiefs (they will need it to cry in). Once could find corresponding superstitions in the West. Isaac Newton spent as much time on Old Testament numerology as he did on Math and Physics.

By: Alexandre

Alexandre — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:04:50 +0000

Personally, a reason ()*&@$ doesn’t look right to me is because parentheses have a very special purpose. When I type a string of characters to replace a language taboo, I typically do not use brackets and parentheses. I think that, as much as possible, the characters should look arbitrary. Which is, of course, not compatible with randomness.
In French-speaking cartoons (from Belgium, especially), there’s a tendency to use “pictograms” along with characters. A skull and bones symbol is fairly typical. So is an atomic mushroom. Chinese characters are also fairly common.

By: oneman

oneman — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:32:28 +0000

Funny -- Leo LaPorte of twit.tv has a netcast with Dick DiBartolo of Mad Magazine (the Daily Giz Wiz) and recently asked him how he and the other Mad writers decide what symbols to use when they want their character to say $@*&! DiBartolo said that there's no set rule, and yet, just random characters don't quite look right. Certainly some deeper schema is at work -- ()*&@$ might not seem right, but $*@% might -- that nobody quite has a handle on.

By: Karen Lofstrom

Karen Lofstrom — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 11:49:24 +0000

I’ve been doing research on raw fish recipes worldwide. I discovered a Chinese tradition of eating raw fish salad on New Year. Various ingredients considered lucky are layered on a platter. Diners then push their chopsticks into the heap and with a shout of “Lo Hei,” they toss the salad into the air. When it’s thoroughly tossed, diners eat it.

This “tradition” is said to have been invented in Singapore in the mid-1960s and seems to be widespread in the Chinese diaspora. I found some websites that expressly stated that this was new, and some that wrote about it as if raw fish salad had been part of Chinese culture forever.