Mysterious Oriental Power? YYDS? The Olympic Games has invented new language among netizens
The Tokyo Olympic Summer Games has just wrapped up, but in China, it will probably live on in the plethora of new slang terms coined by the competition.
Past Olympic Games have been responsible for coining new buzzwords like “primeval power (洪荒之力 hónghuāng zhī lì),” uttered by swimmer Fu Yuanhui at the 2016 Rio Olympics, and this year was no exception. While athletes are fighting for the championship, hoping to bring honor to their country, enthusiastic netizens were also locked in battle on the internet, inventing a variety of new terms to describe their favorite athletes, the slick moves they saw on TV, and their feelings about the competition:
Zhang Wenjie is a contributing writer at The World of Chinese. She loves to share the lifestyles, voices, and concerns of China’s Gen Z. She is also fond of collecting and displaying the flourishing slang expressions in the Chinese language.
