China Enacts Pun Control
Via the Wall Street Journal:
No puns, please. This is China. That’s the message from the country’s media regulators, who on Thursday derided the use of wordplay in advertisements and broadcasts, saying they were “contradictory in spirit to the promotion and continuance of excellent, traditional Chinese culture.” Examples cited by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, or SAPPRFT – whose dim view of language abuse evidently doesn’t include any reticence about long-winded names — include slogans that have been previously used to promote tourism and medical treatment. “They can create misunderstandings for the public, especially for minors,” the regulator said in a notice posted to its site. “They need to be firmly corrected.” The agency isn’t alone in its campaign for linguistic purity. Earlier this year, Communist Party flagship paper People’s Daily also railed against the seeping of English terms such as “CEO” and “wifi” into the Chinese language.