Just one point, to summarize and go back to the main topic: I would be OK (more or less) with things like “high” on the front page, and I wouldn’t have criticized the Oriental, if their strategy actually worked.

But it is obvious that it doesn’t work. Just like it didn’t work when your old auntie got a baseball cap and started calling you “bro”.

Just look at the lame way the Oriental tries to promote discussion in its website forums. Average number of comments: 5. Author: 1 (the editor, re-posting five times and waiting for readers). In one word: Lame.

Jokes aside:

I’m going to try not to get into a debate here on a lot of things, especially since my following comment doesn’t have a great deal to do with the post, but here it is anyway.

“I wonder what most Americans would say if the NYT did that, but again, it is a matter of personal taste. ”

1. Most Americans don’t read the NYT.
2. The principle of asking your audience what they want is extremely problematic.
3. Not asking the public is also extremely problematic at a place like the Times where they decide to borrow literally billions of dollars from moral icons like Carlos Slim at make-Islam-ban-usury style rates.

OK, one final thing. Word formation in Chinese has changed. The era where you get people appropriating/creating new characters like 酷 for “cool” may be over, or it may only be applicable where the sound is found in Chinese (博客, which obviously didn’t have to be 音譯’d anymore than “email” did). The fact is there is an incredible amount of english coming into the language in technical and non-technical areas, and nothing is going to stop it. It’s odd that you think 酷 is fine, since it was railed against by the establishment (and still is rejected in many places), for exactly the same reasons you dislike “high”, so I suppose the principle is just “achieves widespread adoption” despite major sources rejecting it. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.

Ok, one more.

“All that is lame, like an old person trying to be “cool”. It does NOT work. A paper should do its job properly, and then intelligent readers will come, regardless of their age.”

For a paper to do its job properly it has to be appealing and attractive to people. A newspaper is a product, and the media is a business like any other. It does not sit on high and be serious and feed the ignorant masses “the news” anymore. Of course this model still exists in some places, but the internet will kill it. You convince people to buy your paper (people have never paid for news, advertising has (or a govt), GIANT PROBLEM!), read it, care about it, or people go to other places. You do this by appealing to them, and appealing to them by saying “we are going to do this in a stuffy language that doesn’t reflect hip, current, modern, active, usage, but rather a stiff order issued from above” probably isn’t going to cut it. Intelligent readers don’t cut it. You don’t get margins, you get things like newspapers and magazines collapsing, being replaced replaced by organizations 1000 times smaller than they are.

On the other hand, we should not forget that there are many many English expressions that come in the form of calques, and most people don’t even realize. Very common things like “politically correct” are most often American imports.

I don’t think this is bad in itself, as long as it is kept within reasonable limits. In my opinion the rough criteria should be that an import is valid when it introduces a concept that didn’t exist before.

Regarding your “campaign”, I am not in favor of campaigning for these things because it is easy to go too far and spoil the efforts (besides, many young people would deliberately use the banned words). But I do think it is justified to keep an eye on it by reasonable people, especially at the level of the mass media, which has an enormous influence.

In fact, we speak a lot of the French, but I am quite sure many other European countries have some sort of control at the level of the mass media. Not in the form of bans, but as Style Guides and stuff like that, at least for the serious programs. This is not something strange at all, even the BBC had until recently strict requirements for “pure received pronunciation” presenters.

As for Sweden, there’s been some debate over whether there’s too much English coming into the language, but nobody has proposed anything close to the French or Chinese media rules. These words usually fit into the language, as you said, but many people think they are diluting the language. My main problem is when somebody uses a Swedish word and interprets it in an English way. If it makes people worse at their own language, then I’m all for a media campaign.

Hey, related to the language protectionism thing, I was wondering how it works in Sweden. Is there any policy by the media to avoid English buzzwords, or not? Are there English words taken indiscriminately into the language by some groups?

I would imagine Swedish being relatively close to English, many of these loans fit in quite seamlessly, no?

The problem is I am not judging the Oriental in that context. I am judging it as the main non-party paper of a city that is one of the Word’s metropolis, that is hosting the largest EXPO ever, that wants to lead a new image of China (as HuJintao said in the inauguration speech of the EXPO),etc. And also in the context of a paper that attracts $$$ adverts from Western brands like Montblanc.

I think it is a terrible newspaper, and I think that money should not be going where it goes.

However, I will try to keep an eye open for signs of intelligent life in it in the future. And I do plan to read more carefully the literature supplement from now on, your comment made me more curious about it.

From what I have managed to clarify with a few Chinese friends, this word probably came from Taiwan a few years ago, and only a certain kind of people would use it (by no means all young people, my friends are post-80s and they said they would never use it themselves).

It is not a generally accepted word, even among the young. I would not oppose a newspaper writing DVD, or using expressions like 酷! or even 晕！(in their youth section) because these are really part of the language and I have seen them online and offline a thousand times.

But “high” is in a different category, together with “slim”, “OMG” and the likes. I see some commentator above would like the media to use all these terms. Allegedly this is a very good thing to attract the young, as if the young people were so stupid that they will go and read anything just because it has some old buzzwords and memes that are not even hot anymore.

All that is lame, like an old person trying to be “cool”. It does NOT work. A paper should do its job properly, and then intelligent readers will come, regardless of their age.

Finally, regarding the language and foreign loans: I already wrote the post on language protectionism so I will not repeat it all here. But I thing I gave strong reasons, from a purely linguistic perspective, of why the media should be careful with foreign buzzwords in the context of cultural colonization.

I was just asking a few of my Chinese friends that where there and they all confirmed they know the “high” thing, but they think it is a more northern or Taiwanese expression, not so used here. In fact I never came across it in 3 years in Shanghai, but again, perhaps I am not dealing with the right demographic.

Regarding the headline, it is a matter of opinion whether you think that a serious newspaper should write like that or not. I absolutely think it should not, and your comment has not managed to convince me. I wonder what most Americans would say if the NYT did that, but again, it is a matter of personal taste.

And anyway, bear in mind that my critic of the Oriental is not based on those silly headlines, that was just a gimmick to give some humour to my post. My critic is based on more profound reasons, such as for example: that I haven’t read anything interesting coming from it in the last year. See the previous posts for more reasons.

The weekly literary supplement may be an exception (I trust Joel for that if he says so) but frankly speaking you need a bit more than that to make a newspaper in a city like Shanghai.

I disagree. I think trying to appeal to young people and making the newspaper a little hipper and more youthful is as fine a strategy as any when facing a readership that has numerous options. The “All the news that’s fit to print”, doubling down on eternally serious strategy of papers like the New York times doesn’t seem to be going so well. The 蘋果日報化 of the Taiwan and HK markets seems to show that the way to get eyes is to fill a newspaper with sensational, youthful, celeb-style news. I think your experience at tianya also shows that’s what drives the eyes to some extent in China, even if it’s not as clear in the less flexible print market.

TW features extensive english, and zhuyin for Taiwanese in both headlienes and copy in all varieties of print. There seems little doubt barring a frankly impossible to enforce order restricting english usage, that this kind of usage will increase in print media, possibly spreading from places like HK, Beijing or Shanghai, or just continuing to spread organically from the new standards driven by the internet.

High is 家常便飯 in TW, and though it may sound silly to some people, perhaps particularly foreigners who find much of the english usage in chinese “interesting”, as it doesn’t match up with much native english usage, at all, that’s certainly not how it’s received/understood by the parties using it. On the one hand, I want to say, it’s their language, newspapers, etc, on the other hand, I still want to criticize people who do shit like “There’s an old confucian saying…. (not actual confucian saying at all), see Mair’s latest LL post). The difference is, I’m criticizing the the nonsense “old chinese proverb” stuff as a insider in the culture/language, is that something relevant to consider? We report, you decide.