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Following this, the word "harmonious" itself was censored, at which point Chinese netizens began to use the word for "river crab", a near homophone for "harmonious". In a further complication of meaning, sometimes aquatic product (Chinese: 水产) is used in place of "river crab". These euphemisms are also used as verbs.
A euphemism (/ ˈ juː f ə m ɪ z əm / YOO-fə-miz-əm) is an innocuous word or expression used in place of one that is deemed offensive or suggests something unpleasant. [1] Some euphemisms are intended to amuse, while others use bland, inoffensive terms for concepts that the user wishes to downplay.
Diu (Traditional Chinese: 屌 or 𨳒, Jyutping: diu2), literally meaning fuck, is a common but grossly vulgar profanity in Cantonese. In a manner similar to the English word fuck, diu2 expresses dismay, disgrace and disapproval. Examples of expressions include diu2 nei5! (屌你！ or 𨳒你！, fuck you!) and the highly offensive diu2 nei5 ...
The Sanskrit word चीन] (Cina), meaning "China", was transcribed into various forms including 支那 (Zhīnà), 芝那 (Zhīnà), 脂那 (Zhīnà) and 至那 (Zhìnà).Thus, the term Shina was initially created as a transliteration of Cina, and this term was in turn brought to Japan with the spread of Chinese Buddhism.
In historical linguistics, the process of an inoffensive word becoming pejorative is a form of semantic drift known as pejoration.An example of pejoration is the shift in meaning of the word silly from meaning that a person was happy and fortunate to meaning that they are foolish and unsophisticated. [3]
The Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (1947), which was compiled by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang, made numerous important lexicographic innovations. It was the first Chinese dictionary specifically for spoken Chinese words rather than for written Chinese characters, and one of the first to mark characters for being "free" or "bound" morphemes according to whether or not they can stand ...
The term antonym (and the related antonymy) is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings. Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold).
a leading Chinese linguist has remarked that the name 'Lolo' is offensive only when written with the 'dog' radical. There is undoubtedly here some reflection of the underlying Chinese equation of 'word' with 'written character', providing a clue to the 'pejorativization' of 'exonymized' names of this kind: by writing my name with a 'dog ...