Say, amw, can you tell me...

[fflo]

... what the Hong Kong activists I was reading on twitter this morning mean by a "handfoot"?  I take it's a name from the characters that make up a word/concept that has something to do with being a resister, activist, person in the streets, I dunno.  It involves handwriting, somehow.  And is something they're proud to be.

Googling, even with "-disease" (to get rid of all the hand-and-foot disease hits), hasn't done me any good.  With expressions in English it usually does it to throw in "expression", or be careful with the q marks.  Maybe this one isn't an actual expression so much (at least yet), tho, vs. sort of a play on words.  Or I guess it'd be a play in words.

Comments

[amw.livejournal.com]

That's a great question! The answer is: i don't know! Cantonese is a very different language to Mandarin, and most likely this is a play on some Cantonese slang.

What i can say is that in Standard Chinese (Mandarin), 手腳 (literally handfoot) can be used to mean something like a trick. So if you "do a handfoot", then you might be pulling a trick or messing with the results or something.

It might also be something to do with the different types of protestor. If you visit this page: http://chuangcn.org/2020/06/frontlines/ and scroll down about halfway they show a picture with a bunch of different roles. Maybe 手腳 in this context is literally just meant to be "the hands and the feet", i.e. the kids on the front line?

The other possibility is that it is a soundalike for a completely different word. One mainland China example of this is 肏你妈 ("fuck your mother") becoming 草泥马 ("grass mud horse"). In speech the tones are different, but on a computer or phone the letters you type are the same - you just select a different autocomplete option.

Here is a page on Language Log where a linguistics prof linked in his attempts to keep up with the ever-changing protest slang: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44269 I'm sure a lot of it has changed again now, with the new National Security Law making certain phrases into crimes. Perhaps you can email him to see if he can track down the meaning via his students?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Great idea! And I appreciate your response here. Some notion of foot soldier basic out-there doer seems to be in the mix. It'll be nice if a sound-type pun thing is involved!

Maybe I'll write that prof., if I don't figure out more from the twitterverse. It's a curiosity.

Also I won't say grass mud horse at you (it'd be particularly shitty given that she died not too long ago!), but I may feel an urge to utter the words at others now and then. Except of course that's not really a curse I can get behind. I mean, why should Mom keep paying, you know? Poor Mom. Pushed the kid out decades ago and here comes somebody wanting to screw her again over some offense of the child. :)

[amw.livejournal.com]

On the mother thing, it does seem unfair that she's the default target of insults in Chinese. Then again, in English we say "motherfucker" as well, and it's almost gotten to the level of usage that we don't even really think about it as having anything to do with mothers per se, it's just another curse word. I suppose "son of a bitch" and even "bastard" is related. I think most languages i've learned are like this... except Dutch. In Dutch, i remember most insults being related to disease for some peculiar reason.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

P.S. that blog could really suck a girl in

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Hey, guess what? Language log guy thanked me and says he's going to write a post about it later tonight.

[amw.livejournal.com]

Great! The reply is good, referencing 手足 instead of 手腳. I did not know the word 手足 before, but now i know the word to search for i can see it used in many places in Chinese to mean something like 兄弟 (literally "brother", but more commonly used to mean a good friend/bro). This is a much better translation and shows that no matter how "fluent" i might be in everyday Chinese, i still miss a lot of fairly basic vocabulary that comes up in certain social situations.