Mind your language

Internet slang is creeping into common usage in a generational word war, Zhang Lei reports.

A few years ago, Ruo (Teng Yang-Tian-Xia), a retired esports player of the real-time action strategy video game League of Legends, blurted out "Uzi, YYDS", when watching Uzi (Jian Zihao), another Chinese professional LOL player, on a live broadcast.

YYDS, the pinyin abbreviation of the four Chinese character expression, literally meaning "eternal god", illustrates one's feeling for something or someone godlike, awesome and exceptional. An equivalent abbreviation in English would be GOAT-greatest of all time-to describe the person who has performed better than anyone else ever, especially in games.

The abbreviated slang reached its peak of popularity at last year's Tokyo Summer Olympics. Whenever a Chinese player won gold at the Games, the video was awash with YYDS bullet comments, a popular feature on online video sites in China, which allows real-time comments from viewers to fly across the screen.

However, Chinese internet slang solely based on the extensively used alphabetic acronyms from the initials of Chinese characters is raising concern among those in education.

Cheng Xudong, an elementary school teacher in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, says that the evolution of internet slang is not all fun and carefree. From his daily observations, the "geographic boundary" between the internet slang and formal language is disappearing, as he has seen many times the designated compositions he has received from the pupils are flooded with abbreviated slangs.

"As an orthodox Chinese language teacher, I don't feel comfortable when I read these abbreviations in their compositions," he says. "The misuse of homophones is also turning my head in. Ya, (the Chinese interjection to express emotions such as exclamation), is seen many times deliberately replaced by some pupils using one of the homophones that means 'duck'," he adds.

"The sentence 'I am so happy' literally turns to 'I am happy duck' by using the homophone. Whenever a topic revolves around patriotism, some pupils are used to adding YYDS to the word 'motherland', as if they are a natural match and the abbreviated slang could increase momentum."

No matter what happens, young people now sigh with the words, "I emo". "Emo" is the abbreviation of the English word "emotional". When translated into Chinese, it means emotional hard core.

What made those who feel most physically uncomfortable and their blood pressure soar is the well-deserved jue jue zi, a jargon emerged from the reality TV show Produce Camp 2020 and doubles the character jue (great, awesome) with zi, which was originally an honor title and can mean "master", to create an enhanced tone that means fantastic or awesome.