Asian internet slang

Posted by Adrianne Jeffries on August 16, 2012 01:00 pm 5

So I was reading a magazine story the other day that mentioned the Chinese word "zipai," which specifically means "a photo taken of oneself posted online." The nuance is that it is not necessarily like a sexy photo, although it often is. That struck me as a great neologism. I feel like there are internet-native phenomena that need new words like this. We have some in English, like "phishing" and "fusking" and "noob" and "wantrepreneur." But it occurred to me that there are probably lots of internet-specific words and phrases like this in Chinese and other languages.

I pinged a friend who works in Chinese startups, and he referred me to this dictionary of memes, although most of them are related to faking out the government censors.

A few more:

konozama (Japanese)

The situation that one's preordered goods on Amazon.co.jp are not shipped on their release day or sometimes cancelled without notification. A reverse spelling of Amazon OK, which literally means "this situation."

preved (Russian)

A type of joke created by deliberate misspelling.

I would be curious to collect more of these.