LJ Idol Week #24 - "Babel"

[prog_schlock]

This is my entry for week #24 of therealljidol. Some strong language and epic cluelessness ahead.

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There are 178 parent languages on our planet with over 1000 dialects
It's amazing we communicate at all ~ "AEIOU Sometimes Y" by EBN/OZNIf I were to describe my cluelessness as a body of water, it would be the Dead Sea of cluelessness. Its waters are still

Comments

[prog_schlock]

Oh my goodness! That is a genuinely epic mistake!

There's a story from the jingju (Beijing opera) world in Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution, there were only a handful of approved plays. Those plays had been carefully crafted to ensure that they communicated the correct propaganda messages and when actors deviated from the text (even accidentally), consequences were swift and severe.

The thing about the Chinese language (and you might know this) is that tone changes the meaning of words. Mandarin Chinese has four tones and some of the other Chinese dialects have more. Its not unusual for a native speaker of one dialect to mispronounces a Mandarin word in a way that changes its meaning just by getting the tone wrong.

In one of the plays, there's a character who is rescued by the protagonist. The protagonist is a female tea-shop owner (and secret communist spy against the Nationalists). She hid this other character in a giant water vat and he was, thus, not found by the enemy troops. He sings, at one point, "She put me in her water vat to hide."

The actor playing this role was from a southern province with a different dialect. One night he got the tone wrong on "water vat" and turned it into "vagina." He did not return to the show after that.

Thank you for that terrific story as well as for reading!

[kathrynrose]

It's hard for me to believe that whoever wrote that play didn't see the possibility of that happening.

I mean, come on.