Read on Twitter
thinking about the sense of verbal play lost in translation and specifically about the difficulty of translating lwj’s speech patterns into English. like.
fandom tends to write him as not using contractions, which makes sense! he is formal! formal English avoids contractions!
fandom tends to write him as not using contractions, which makes sense! he is formal! formal English avoids contractions!
but formal, cultural flex Confucian literati Chinese of the kind that lwj practices is all
about
contractions
it’s all about embodying verbal mastery by leaving out as much as you can, saying the absolute precise minimum to vividly convey what he means.
about
contractions
it’s all about embodying verbal mastery by leaving out as much as you can, saying the absolute precise minimum to vividly convey what he means.
it isn’t usually done by shortening the word itself, since Chinese characters are single syllables joined into pairs or groups for extra meaning or disambiguating homophones, but by making one word do the work of three, playing with how Chinese lacks formal grammar, and shared
cultural context. and because of the way that trad scholarly Chinese culture links knowledge and class markers to what you’re worth as a human (sigh), the combo w/how lwj looks and acts and dresses is very much, well https://open.spotify.com/track/41Fflg7qHiVOD6dEPvsCzO?si=jOIwKocJTQS-kz7qNxArkw
cf wwx who usually uses a less formal register but peppers his speech with literary references, or my/jgy who tends to use a fairly formal register with ornamentation and pretty games. https://twitter.com/quigonejinn/status/1274906140598509568
lwj also shifts up and down the contraction register — he is usually contracted with lxc, and it’s especially notable in contrast to lxc who usually talks in a register I read as “educated everyday,” which I take to be the habit of somebody who has to talk for a living and GET
STUFF DONE, so he doesn’t have the fucking time to be fucking around, reminding people they’re not as cool as he is or leaving room for him to be misinterpreted. So Wangji is contracted w/him, and sometimes it’s to show his respect (like when he reassures Xichen w/a pair of
prettily and concisely constructed phrases in episode 3), and sometimes, it’s because he’s A N G R Y (like during that exchange about the relative trustworthiness of WWX and JGY). but overall it takes place in a context of shared cultural understanding —
the Lan are formal w/family names (shufu v shushu for qiren, fuqin v a-die for qingheng-jun), but you get the feeling that Xichen would be f i n e to be called something less formal than the wildly formal xiongzhang, but Wangji uses it because he thinks do Xichen as both his
brother and sect leader and means to give him every scrap of that respect (until, you know, they disagree about something)
but all of this is to say, that I read lwj’s talk with lxc to be contracted as a sign of commonality — so much of their exchanges are body language, with
but all of this is to say, that I read lwj’s talk with lxc to be contracted as a sign of commonality — so much of their exchanges are body language, with
Xichen responding to Wangji based not only want Wangji says with his mouth, but also his face and body and their historical positions that they know haven’t changed. They know each other so well that in this context, Wangji’s speech style is an affirmation of their commonality,
them being at the start of the show very much the Confucian ideal of brotherhood — the wise and benevolent elder brother who takes care of, and is deeply respected by, his younger brother who wholeheartedly devotes himself to supporting his brother and family and sect.
And I think about that speech, where so much is not spoken aloud bevaise of shared context and personal history and respect and love, and well the contrast with, well, one of lwj’s most famous lines where he contracts and omits NOTHING: https://hunxi-guilai.tumblr.com/post/616322008191549441/this-is-such-a-minor-question-for-someone-with
su she is too stupid to be able to appreciate what lwj does with language, so lwj is gonna use all the words, and nobody in earshot is going to be left in any doubt whatsoever what this 10 thinks of this 5
it’s so flagrantly petty, tbh, that it actually makes me like Wangji more
it’s so flagrantly petty, tbh, that it actually makes me like Wangji more
