Before we get into the real content, I just want to express my gratitude to all those who have voiced their pleasure in reading and encouragement for my continued writing. Today's post is probably going to be a bit more dry with less wit to boot, but hang around anyway.
i) rumblings on (sub)urbanism.
I am trained as an architect, and perhaps more valuable than any lesson I've learned about making buildings, is that as an architect, it is our fundamental duty to dream. Don't get me wrong though. I am a pragmatic idealist. I believe in things that can actually be executed and accomplished, because that's the only path for change. Parametric whims bear no interest to me. And despite my plans and efforts to escape the architecture industry, my training and psyche will forever stay with me. In such, my interest in the built environment will most likely never change.
A week ago, I engaged in a conversation about the future of Chinese cities. China, and of course...
(After completing this part of my blog entry, I realized it was too long, somewhat incoherent, and probably too boring for the majority of you who aren't architects / urbanists - a trifecta for blog failure in our attention deficient society. And so I'm cutting it short, and including the rest as a link for your perusal only if it strikes your fancy.)
ii) Zagat prose.
I don't know why I'm writing about the Zagat restaurant guide. I haven't flipped through one in probably a year or so, but in the process of writing this blog, I have inadvertently given more thought to the process of writing as means of disseminating information, and how the internet has made public opinion accessible through blogs such as this one. User-generated content seems to be the fad these days, with good reason too of course, but perhaps (and I haven't checked my sources on this) a predecessor to blogs and online reviews is the print version of the famous Zagat surveys. I don't have a copy with me at the moment, but Zagat reviews typically read like this:
- The "owner of this place makes it all worth while". "She is a very kind" and "warm person". "The prices are good" and "the food is great". "It's place go to if you need some quick and good".
Notice the generous use of quotes. The Zagat survey, you see, is user-generated content. Zagat does not actually review the restaurants themselves, but rather receives and publishes customer opinion. What makes it facinating is that rather than publishing snipets of stand-alone quotes, Zagat edits and joins them into seamless sentences, presenting various user opinions as one. So while stand-alone quotes may be bulletpoints for browsing, their fusion as one sentence presents a tone of unity and authority, and I think is an imitable style of writing to make online user-generated content even more accessible. So rather than scouring through 86 reviews on Yelp, imagine all of that condensed into a much more concise format with the option to expand to include the full review. So with the sample quote from above, placing your cursor over any of the quotes will expand it to include the full review, and removing your cursor will make it disappear again. I bet there already are websites out there with this format in place, and if not, I call first dibs and all patents.
iii) a new (?) word from the Chinglish dictionary
As you may or may not know, a particular phenomenon that has emerged out of Hong Kong is the canto-based Chinglish dialect, a text-based and ad hoc pronunciation guide to mimic Chinese words. This is most often used in online chats where typing and reading Chinese characters may not be most convenient. My friends Jenny and Gary are my teachers in this most inaccurate language. There are essentially no rules and no consistencies. Improvisation reigns supreme. One's ability to converse in the language is confined only by one's imagination. Think about it as an equivalent to the hip hop vocabulary, where proper words such as "holler" becomes "holla" and "for sure" becomes "fosho". However, it's much more interesting when the task at hand is to translate Chinese characters into English sounding syllables. One example you may be familiar with is "Gui Lo" - standing for 鬼佬 - an often-used and perhaps even pejorative term that refers to westerners. But my friend Gary has taken this translation a step further, and in his Chinglish vocabulary now uses the term "Ghost Guy", which word-by-word literally translates to 鬼 (ghost) 佬 (guy), and of course the female equivalent 鬼 (ghost) 婆 (grandma).
We can get into this more and try to break down their meanings and why there's an apparent contradiction in the use of a term of reverence ("grandma") within the pejorative phrase of 鬼婆 (western woman). But in any case, my interest for the moment is really only in the linguistic creativity that emerges out of the local conditions within a global language.
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