Thursday, April 22, 2010

News: Chinese web surfers go gaga for English buzz phrases


She captured the music world’s attention with her infectious songs and bizarre stage performances. Now Lady Gaga has won over a powerful new audience: China’s internet-savvy youth.

Ever on the lookout for new, and sometimes subversive, ways to express themselves online, young Chinese men and women have adopted the mantra “Oh My Lady Gaga!” as a replacement for “Oh My God!”.

“Sandy Beijing – Oh My Lady Gaga!” was the title used by one young surfer as his title for a series of photographs of Beijing in a fog of orange sand during one of the worst duststorms of the spring. Another man, nervous about meeting his girlfriend’s parents, wrote in his blog: “Oh My Lady Gaga. I’m already so nervous about meeting your parents maybe I will faint.” The expression is also popular in text messaging and in chatrooms, where peppering conversations with English slang or acronyms is the epitome of cool.

The trend is causing anxiety, however, among those in charge of monitoring and maintaining the integrity of Mandarin. “If we don’t pay attention and don’t take measures to stop mixing Chinese with English, the Chinese language won’t remain pure in a couple of years,” Huang Youyi, editor-in-chief of the China International Publishing Group, said.

Such concerns have spread to the state broadcaster, China Central Television. Authorities are said to have been issued orders banning English acronyms from broadcasts — meaning that popular abbreviations as NBA, for the US National Basketball Association, must now be pronounced in Chinese and in full. In the case of the NBA — closely followed in China because of Yao Ming, the Chinese player — that will require a ten-syllable phrase.

For the moment, Oh My Lady Gaga! is safe — at least until it is unseated by the next fashionable English phrase.

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