Language Log: Decapitated Democracy, Headless Liberty

A couple of days ago, and within minutes of each other, David Moser and Brendan O'Kane called my attention to the latest graphemic pun going around the "Nèi liánwǎng 内联网" (what some netizens call the firewalled Chinese Internet, and what we might translate as "Intranet") is to refer to the 目田 and 氏王 enjoyed by Chinese citizens. Literally, that would be the mùtián 目田 ("eye-field") and the shīwáng 氏王 ("clan-king").  Of course, this makes no sense, especially not in the context of the "rights" enjoyed by Chinese citizens.  However, once again, in their desire to outwit the ever more zealous censors, clever netizens are now using mùtián 目田 ("eye-field") and shīwáng 氏王 ("clan-king") to refer to zìyóu 自由 ("freedom, liberty") and mínzhǔ 民主 ("democracy"), where the "heads" of all four characters have been lopped off.  Thus, China's netizens have not only outsmarted the censors, they have conveyed a not at all subtle denunciation of the kind of zìyóu 自由 ("freedom, liberty") and mínzhǔ 民主 ("democracy") enjoyed by Chinese citizens:  mùtián 目田 ("eye-field") and shīwáng 氏王 ("clan-king"), where all four characters making up zìyóu 自由 ("freedom, liberty") and mínzhǔ 民主 ("democracy") have been decapitated. An analogous effect could be achieved in English by writing "reedom; iberty" and "emocracy," which are acephalic versions of "freedom; liberty" and "democracy."  Someone might object that "reedom; iberty" and "emocracy" aren't words, so they cannot serve as puns.  But I would counter that mùtián 目田 ("eye-field") and shīwáng 氏王 ("clan-king") aren't words either, yet people understand well enough what they stand for when the idea of headlessness is factored in.  Furthermore, it is easy to recognize the referents of "reedom; iberty" and "emocracry" without any instruction about their headlessness, since that is immediately evident, whereas for mùtián 目田 ("eye-field") and shīwáng 氏王 ("clan-king") to be recognized as beheaded versions of zìyóu 自由 ("freedom, liberty") and mínzhǔ 民主 ("democracy"), there needs to be a fairly clear context to the discussion in which they are used. Be that as it may, Kaiser Kuo tweeted, "It's just like 'freedom and democracy' but it's missing some of the crucial points." Brendan tweeted in with a slightly modified quote from Braveheart: "They'll tak our 玍叩, but they'll nivver tak our 目田!"  We already know what mùtián 目田 ("eye-field") signifies ("freedom, liberty"); following the same pattern of decapitated characters, gǎkòu 玍叩 ("odd-knock") stands for shēngmìng 生命 ("life"). The original line from Braveheart was "They can take our lives, but they can never take our freedom!" For a discussion of the current pother over eye-field and clan-king, see C. Custer's piece on ChinaGeeks for September 1 called "Beheading Freedom."