Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

No, it’s not sex industry, just sexy běijīnghuà. Who’s responsible for the cheap headline tricks? Blame sexybeijing.tv…

Why had I never come across SexyBeijing.tv before last week?! The hostess, Anna Sophie Loewenberg aka Su Fei, is both forever-single and singular. Whether it’s her sundresses, pretty darned good běijīnghuà, or disarmingly candid questions and commentary — she has a knack for weaving personal questions into Mandarin banter and getting spontaneous responses from the kind of on-the-street types that you don’t usually get to hear from. Best of all for Beijing Sounds, she does most of her work in this capital city. Thus, through her interviews of in-the-hútòng Beijingers speaking thick běijīnghuà, we can get a sexy twist on the decidedly unsexy topic of intervocalic sibilant elision [yawn], which might be better stated as:

Beijingers sometimes drop the sh, zh and x in the middle of words/phrases.

You might think it’s not just unsexy, but even unworthy as a Beijing Sounds topic. After all, lotsa languages do a similar thing. My relatives from New Mexico tend to turn “doesn’t” into “dunt” or even “dun” depending on context (and the “dunt” is not the same as the “don’t” used for 3rd person in some English dialects — it really is just “doesn’t” minus the Z sound in the middle).

But in Beijing you can’t avoid the elision any more than you can avoid your neighbor’s buttocks on the #5 subway. Read the rest of this entry »

[Sound files are all at the bottom of the post]

Wallowing is a vile, unworthy habit. You inevitably get sucked into it from time to time. But too often and you become, as GB Shaw put it,

a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy

It’s a choice you make every day. Whatcha gonna do: wallow, or create something? Your social environment strongly influences the decision. Conversations about life tend to go in one direction or the other, but not stay in the middle, whether you’re talking with your coworker, or your brother, or your barber, classmate, spouse, childhood friend… You end up on one side or the other of the continental divide, either wallowing in self-pity and loathing, or fired up to create something, do something, fight entropy.

But what pushes you one way or the other when you’re on the ridge? Read the rest of this entry »