Talk:grass mud horse

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"A calque of the Chinese 草泥马 (Pinyin" -- I don't think calques meet CFI ? Goldenrowley 05:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

So what, you’d delete deus ex māchinā simply because it’s a calque of the Ancient Greek ἀπό μηχανῆς θεός (apó mēkhanês theós)? Whilst translations can be unidiomatic in the “target” language (and in which case, they tend not to deserve entries), that is not the case with grass mud horse, which if taken in any way other than as the name of a camelid, looks like gibberish. Keep. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 12:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia article is very confusing; does this actually exist as an animal, or is it just symbolic image? Send to RFV or keep, as I think it would pass and RFV anyway. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:45, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

And the definition is not consistent with the Wikipedia article. It should be Mythical animal (...). Lmaltier 16:14, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I understand it to be a calque of the characters used for alpacas and possibly other similar real animals. It might not pass RfV because it has only been in the news since March 2009 in this sense. See google images. It could stand a neo/protologism tag for the currently topical sense. In an earlier sense it would be an interesting test of the application Ruakh's translation-target suggestion for amending WT:CFI. If I am correct:

• keep, move to RfV, add older sense, add neologism tag to existing sense DCDuring TALK 16:41, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I strongly believe this should be kept, and rewrote the definition for your evaluation. --Hekaheka 13:58, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

I'd still like a nice pretty citation. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:53, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Grass mud horse yields 31,000 hits in Google. This is from Michael Wines's article in New York Times of March 12th 2009 [1]:

BEIJING — Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon.

The popularity of the grass-mud horse has raised questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information.

A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.--Hekaheka 00:20, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Cited so very strong keep; however the caps are troubling me, it seems to be Grass Mud Horse in most of the citations, but people care so little about capital letters these days, it's hard to tell. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:10, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Kept Mglovesfun (talk) 21:28, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

[grass mud] horse vs grass [mud horse]

Which is the correct analysis? Backinstadiums (talk) 15:56, 15 July 2022 (UTC)