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

[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.