Slash, taboos, Chinese culture and language

[Tabouli]

Hail, people...

Amy:
> Maybe the movies should take a tip from fanfic and print "there be slash here!" right on the posters.

Why is homoerotic material called slash, out of interest?

Amber:
> Instead, I had to sit through sex joke after sex joke (ALL of them 
disgusting and not funny to me) beside my father.

Ah yes, the ol' deliberately breach taboos for comic/shock effect.  Much like my experience of Eddie Murphy or someone saying "Shit.  Fuck.  Shit.  Fuck." or some such and seeing my neighbour keeling over with laughter at how Naughty he was being.  Witty stuff.  I have theories about the Angophone discomfort with sex springing from Queen Victoria, but I'm still working on them.

The amount of times I've sat trying to explain why some Australian 18 year olds still think it's hysterically funny to stick peas up their noses at the dinner table to more, er, sophisticated international students ("You see, in Australia part of becoming an adult is demonstrating how little they care about the rules older adults have imposed on them by breaking them flagrantly in front of their peers.  I'm a rebel!  I'm far too cool to follow the rules!  They're actually trying to assert their independence and maturity.  Honest.")

David:
> Anyway, to change the subject rapidly to the reason this is a post 
not a personal e-mail to Tabouli, is that on the main list she 
mentioned the Chinese week.  What is the relationship of this to the 
Western (ie Middle Eastern) week?  Does the Sky/Heaven/Sun day fall 
on Sunday?   Do they share a common origin or is it the coincidence 
of conveniently chopping the month in four?

I'm wary of launching into song about the history of the Chinese calendar, as my knowledge there is very patchy (Craig might be your man here), but these days the Chinese and the Western week match up, in that our Sunday is their Sky/Heaven/Sun day.  However, as the Chinese converted from their own year numbering to our AD year system (last century?), I can't say for sure that they didn't also inherit our week.  I'd need to do a Hermione and delve into the library/Web to find out.

Linguistics I'm more familiar with, though still open to correction from anyone more learned!  The word for week in Chinese is "xingqi", the characters for which literally means something like star (xing) period (qi).  Monday is xingqi yi (one), Tuesday xingqi er (two) and so on to Sunday, xingqi tian (character which can mean sky or heaven, depending on context and how poetic you're feeling), also known as xingqi ri (character meaning sun).  I've noticed that the Cantonese seem to use the character "ri" (which would be pronounced differently in Cantonese) and Mandarin speakers favour "tian" but may use either.

more David:
> Finally, what book? and what does Fff. mean?

I think the book you mention was the great work (informative, yet witty and accessible) I hope to write some day comparing the cultures of all the major Anglophone regions.  As yet very much in the speculative stage.  I fantasise about someone deciding this is so worthy a project they give me a grant to fly around the world interviewing people!  (donations, anyone?)

Fff is a written scoff referring to the Wizard of Oz (no great masterpiece IMHO).  Possibly also a symbol meaning very very loud on musical scores...




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]