Mao and Word Processing

The People’s Daily, everyone’s favorite supplement to The Onion, has published a two-part list of 49 “obsolete” Chinese words of the last decade, including some words I still hear in 2006 quite frequently, like ‘neighbor’, ‘danwei’ (work unit) and ‘VCD’.

Two of the obsolete words in particular caught my eye: ‘Mao’ and ‘WPS’.

The People’s Daily has the following descriptions:

Mao: disappeared after 2000

Mao was a nickname that Chinese people gave to the modem because of a similarity in pronunciation. From the mid-1990s on, an increasing number of Chinese got dial-up access to the internet. The modem was a necessity in many households and the internet has had an increasing influence on every aspect of modern China.

Since 2000, China has been building nationwide facilities for broadband internet. The country has quickly entered the era of broadband internet access. The mao has become unnecessary and is being retired from Chinese households.

It seems that at least someone has a sense of humor at People’s Daily. I find that last sentence especially amusing.

WPS: disappeared after 2000

Word processing system (WPS) was China-developed word processing software. In the era of DOS, every computer in China installed WPS. Everyone who wanted to use a computer had to be familiar with WPS. When Microsoft’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) technology emerged, it quickly stole the market and WPS became outdated.

In my opinion this is a somewhat unfortunate development. Chinese are obsessed with Microsoft Word and the .doc file format. For example, I recently gave my students an assignment to email me and tell me their class number, student number and name. A number of emails came with nothing at all written in the email itself, but rather with the information I asked for included as a .doc attached file. We’re not talking about a 5000 word writing assignment here, we’re talking about a sentence. MS Word is a bit overkill.

Tags Chinese

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