Ma Jingtao, “lord of the roaring mode”…

Ever since the invention of that omnipresent (some say omnipotent) thing named Internet, humanity seems to have embarked on a new age of “collective creativity”, resulting in millions of new “modes of writing” in the virtual space. By blending written vernacular with local dialects, homonyms, puns and exaggerated punctuation, the Chinese “netizens” have now turned out a universal mode of writing suited to all who are not contented with their major, profession or life in general (but who on earth is?).

This mode of writing is called paoxiaoti (咆哮体), or “the roaring mode of writing”. The gist of it is to follow every sentence with at least 5 exclamation remarks, and use extraordinarily angry hallmark expressions. It is believed that this style of writing started with a group on douban.com featuring a melodramatic actor named Ma Jingtao (马景涛), who often plays the role of distressed heroes shouting out his anger with distorted facial expressions. After this group became famous for using excessive exclamation remarks, someone on renren.com started to complain about the difficulty of studying French in the university using not only exclamation remarks but also many hilarious hallmark words, and the tread immediately got viral and triggered a whole series of immitators complaining about the difficulty of English study, anthropology, arts, law, film studies, computer language, etc. Such writing soon spilled over to traditional media and even formal college  notices, and culminated in a video made by a group of students in Westerminster University in which a “big-eyed British girl and a handsome British guy” shouted out “We who live in the UK can’t afford too much hurt either!”

The video is here:   

For those who don’t understand Chinese in the video, before seechina could provide an English version, one of the jokes is: “Everybody thinks we Brits like to read books in the tube, actually that’s because we don’t have mobile signals down there!”
 
For those who are interested in further studies, some notes of the hallmark expressions:

youmuyou （有木有）,meaning “isn’t it so?” when spelled in a local Chinese dialect, it gives an explosive effect as if shouting piercing questions in the face of a large audience.

nima (尼玛), it looks like a Tibetan word, but actually is the homonym of “your mother”, a well-disguised curse now open to everyone.

beicui(悲催),pathetic.

kengdie (坑爹), intentionally misleading.

haizhi (孩纸), the Yunnan dialect for “kid”, reminiscent of those who really wanted to pronounce northern Chinese dialect with a curled tongue but just tragically overdid it. Now “haizhi” can refer to anybody, such as “kid who studies French”. 

shangbuqi (伤不起), ”can’t afford too much hurt”, widely used in paoxiaoti to describe the pathetic nature of a certain kind of people, as if arguing: “we are more hurt than you are”.  Imagine a group of losers competing who has more scars…

nimei (你妹), “your sister”, samewise, it’s a curse in a brief and civilized way.

laoniang (老娘), “me your old mother”, a vulgar way to address oneself, mostly used by girls who don’t have a boyfriend, happen to have chosen a difficult major, hard to find a job, feel desperate because she has to pretend to be sweet and helpful to people’s incessant plead for free help etc.

For clues of other representative paoxiaoti stories (in Chinese), see here: http://www.douban.com/group/topic/18130042/