They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.
So we get gems like
The old man the boat. (The old people are manning the boat)
The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. (The apartment complex is home to both married and single soldiers, plus their families)
The prime number few. (People who are excellent are few in number.)
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississipi. (The cotton thatclothing is made of)
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. (As in he ducks out of his responsibilities)
We painted the wall with cracks. (The cracked wall is the one that was pained.)
China’s netizens are all in a twitter over the account of a carpenter who was commissioned to make a cinnabar red high-backed chair with the finials at the top to be “in the shape of dragons’ heads” (chéng lóngtóu 成龍頭). Unfortunately, he misinterpreted the directions to mean “[in the shape of] Jackie Chan’s head” (“Chénglóng tóu 成龍頭”).
LMAO ok so to elaborate on this absolute gem, notice how the characters provided for “in the shape of dragons’ heads” and “[in the shape of] Jackie Chan’s head” are identical? That wasn’t a typo.
The thing you need to understand about Chinese names is that they all have meaning. And I don’t mean that in the sense of “if you trace the etymology back through two languages it has its roots in a Hebrew phrase that means “God is my ____” that many Western names have. I mean that in the sense of “almost all of these words are still in regular use today and my parents very literally named me “pretty [and] wise” in Chinese.
(Sidenote: This is why we get annoyed at made-up ‘Chinese’ names that just pull two random vaguely Chinese-sounding syllables together. It is blindingly obvious when it’s not a real name).
成 (chéng) means “to become”, “to turn into”. 龍 (lóng) is “dragon”. Thus, Jackie Chan’s Chinese stage name, 成龍 (Chénglóng), literally means “become dragon”. (頭 (tóu), of course, means “head”)
(Further sidenote: This is actually a bit of a pun/reference. Specifically, it is a reference to Bruce Lee, whose stage name was 小龍 (Xiǎolóng), or, “Little dragon”. So Jackie’s chosen stage name means both “become dragon”, and “become [like] Bruce Lee”)
The other thing you need to know about Chinese is that we don’t put spaces between terms in written text.
What all this means is that the way you’d write “[carve] into dragon heads” can be identical to the way you’d write “[carve] Jackie Chan’s head”, and literally the only difference would be where you pause when you vocalise it: before lóngtóu, or after chénglóng. XD
I’m would like to share two of my more frequently used sites. These sites focus on logical fallacies and cognitive bias. These are common habits/perceptions individuals have that are counterproductive and even toxic. By being aware and educating ourselves on these things, hopefully we can better communicate and understand each other.
These sites are very user friendly and I very much appreciate its simplicity considering my struggle with long textbook explanations and articles. Also, I am an idiot.
We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate. To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation. I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults. That most of us have found adulthood just as morally ambiguous as we expected it to be falls perhaps into the category of prophecies self-fulfilled: I am simply not sure.
To a skeptic, there’s a perpetual worry that little things that have been taken for granted are based more in superstition and folklore than anything as concrete as sound scientific theory. He’d spent no small part of his life reinforcing his beliefs, examining the structures upon which they stood, and making sure he was very much the solid ground type, rather than those who favoured the beachfront.
The light bled across the floor before swirling up to fill the room with a lurid red haze. Morning had arrived before he had, and by the time his eyes creaked open the room was lost to the light. The night had been hectic and event filled to sufficiently narrow his focus so that he had seen only bed. No teeth cleaning, barely time to shed his clothes before hitting the duvet, and certainly no opportunity to close the curtains.
She was still asleep beside him, the steady rate of her breathing marking her as a lost cause, mired in sleep for a good while yet. He didn’t have the heart to wake her. He barely had the heart to continue trudging his way towards consciousness, out of the warmth and into the day. The duvet slid off his body with all the reluctance he felt, and he stood.
The cold was always first felt against his softness, that one vulnerable member shivering at the feel of it, a loud complaint he chose to ignore. The light had intrigued him, and his curiosity had always run ahead of his own personal comfort. It was why he was here, rather than anywhere else. Why she was in his bed, instead of someone who was more interested in babies than orgasms.
He stood at the window, and despite the ochre of the dawn he was somehow desaturated, a pale figure against a wash of scarlet. It was as if he was catching up to the morning, still slipping from the treacled embrace of the night.
Outside that room, London was a bloodbath. Terraced houses painted sanguine, parks the muddy brown of a healing cut as the greens dirtied the red, fought against it. The sky was devastating.
The rhyme bobbed to the surface of his consciousness, what little of it had woken up. It was his mother’s voice, but there was no rhythm to it, little melody. It was spoken like a warning.
Red sky at night, Shepard's delight. Red sky in the morning, Shepard's warning.
It was a vestige of superstition, and he doubted even his mother had believed it. But it had sounded about right, and despite himself he could feel an ominous dread skitter at the back of his awareness.
He glanced over his shoulder, looked at the way the light merged with the gold in her hair, burnished it, made it warmer. It felt unnatural, made her look like someone else.
He stood there, outlined against the blood sky, until the sun shrugged off the drama and the colour palette returned to normal, all the red drained from the sky. He waited until she returned to normal, and the world with her.
But you don’t know what I mean, when I say that word. You’re not thinking, but then, what Princess ever did? A Princess gets the crown, dons the tiara, has the pretty dresses. But a Princess gets locked up in the tower, poisoned by the step mother, locked in slumber until she’s saved.
Has there ever been a role more objectified than the Princess? A political tool, and nothing more, for the longest time. Cementing relationships, placating feuds, and being the diplomatic pawns for the fathers, the Kings, the lieges.
And then there’s the straight condescension of it all. The inflection of tone that turns just so so that you know when I call you 'Princess’ I’m calling you precious. Precious to me, yes, but also precious as a character trait. A nod to quite how happy you are to tap into your emotions, act the brat.
Most of all, though, I call you Princess because I always wanted to fuck royalty.
