电脑与网络

电脑 (diànnǎo, "electric brain") beat the official term. Standards bodies and textbooks say 计算机 (jìsuànjī, "calculating machine"), and a computer science department is a 计算机系, but the word people actually speak came up through Taiwan and Hong Kong usage and won the mainland's mouths: the brain metaphor was simply better. A laptop is a 笔记本电脑 ("notebook electric brain"), routinely shortened to 笔记本, so the same word covers a paper notebook and a MacBook, and context sorts it out.

The machine's anatomy translates by direct calque. Software is 软件 (ruǎnjiàn, "soft goods") and hardware is 硬件 (yìngjiàn, "hard goods"), with 件 the same component-counting morpheme as in 零件 (spare parts). The keyboard is a 键盘 (jiànpán, "key tray," sharing 盘 with the abacus's 算盘), the mouse is a 鼠标 (shǔbiāo, "mouse pointer," the rodent imported intact), and the screen is a 屏幕 (píngmù). To boot up is 开机, to shut down is 关机, the same 开/关 pair that opens and closes doors and switches everything else in the language.

网 (wǎng) is a pictograph of a net, visible as crossed cords in oracle-bone forms, and for most of its three thousand years it caught fish and birds. The internet gave it a second career as one of the most productive morphemes in modern Chinese. The full formal word is 互联网 (hùliánwǎng, "mutually-linked net," a precise calque of "internet"); 网络 (wǎngluò) covers networks in general; and bare 网 prefixes or suffixes almost anything, as the pattern table shows. An internet café is a 网吧 (wǎngbā, "net bar"), the second syllable a sound-loan from English "bar," and the phrase 断网 (duànwǎng, "the net is cut") is the modern household emergency.

The metaphor's older career continues alongside: 法网 is the net of the law, and the chengyu 天罗地网 ("nets in heaven, nets on earth") describes an inescapable dragnet. A learner who knows 网 in both careers can parse most new coinages on sight.

手机 (shǒujī, "hand machine") is the single most consequential object in contemporary Chinese daily life, because urban China runs on it to a degree that still startles visitors. Payment is 扫码 (sǎomǎ, scanning a QR code, 二维码 èrwéimǎ "two-dimensional code") through 微信 (Wēixìn, WeChat) or 支付宝 (Zhīfùbǎo, Alipay); cash has become rare enough that the central bank periodically reminds merchants it is still legal tender. The verb 刷 (shuā, to swipe or scroll, originally "to brush") covers card-swiping, face-scanning (刷脸, "brushing your face"), and doomscrolling (刷手机, 刷视频), a one-character history of interface design.

The social verbs matter as much as the hardware nouns. 加微信 ("add me on WeChat") has replaced exchanging phone numbers; a 朋友圈 (péngyouquān, "friend circle") is the WeChat feed where social 面子 is now partly performed; 发红包 (sending a digital red envelope) moved a Lunar New Year ritual onto the phone so thoroughly that the physical envelope now has a nostalgic tint. Charging vocabulary rounds out survival needs: 充电宝 (chōngdiànbǎo, "charging treasure") is a power bank, and 没电了 ("out of electricity") excuses a dead phone and, figuratively, a dead person-battery at the end of a workweek.

Chinese internet slang leans on the same homophone engine as the lucky-number culture. 666 means "skilled" because 六 (liù) sounds like 溜 (liù, smooth); 520 means "I love you" because wǔ èr líng approximates 我爱你; 88 is "bye bye." To like a post is 点赞 (diǎnzàn, "tap approve"), a like-count chaser is 求赞, and a viral post 火了 ("caught fire") or 刷屏了 ("flooded the screen"). A 弹幕 (dànmù, "bullet curtain") is the layer of viewer comments that streams across videos on Bilibili, a Chinese invention (by way of Japan's Niconico) with no Western equivalent, and watching a film 开弹幕 versus 关弹幕 is a genuine cultural preference divide.

The slang layer churns fast, but a few items have proven durable enough to teach: 网红 (influencer), 直播 (zhíbō, livestreaming, whose hosts 主播 sell everything from lipstick to excavators), 吐槽 (tǔcáo, to roast or gripe, a loan from Japanese via Taiwan), and 躺平 (tǎngpíng, "lying flat," the 2021 word for opting out of the rat race that alarmed state media into editorials). Slang here does what 成语 did in classical prose: it compresses a whole social stance into two syllables.