Guest contributor: Elfsa Tyre
February 11, 2022 – Cyberspace ;).
In a surprising turn of events, winner of the Olympics women’s big freeski gold medal, American-born Eileen Gu was reportedly taught the meaning of the English word “literally” by an unidentified Weibo user in China.
After a Chinese social media comment by Gu thanking her mother and Olympics volunteers, an upset Chinese social media user named Cilla said “[it’s] not fair” that Gu could use Instagram in China while all other Chinese citizens can’t.
Instagram and Facebook have been banned in China since the 2014 pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
According to screenshots of this conversation that can be found freely everywhere on the internet – except in China, Gu replied,
“[A]nyone can download a vpn [sic] its [sic] literally free on the App Store.”
It did not take long for waves of angry Chinese internet users to criticize Gu.
Strangely, one unidentified Weibo user decided not to criticize Gu’s post for its missing comma and missing apostrophe. Instead, he took issue with her misuse of the word “literally”:
“Literally, I’m not ‘anyone.’ Literally, it’s illegal for me to use a VPN. Literally, it’s not fxxking free at all.”
This upset user appears to be following the Oxford Dictionary meaning of the word “literally” as “exactly” or Merriam-Websters’ definition as “exactly equivalent”.
He is pointing out that Gu’s comments were literally inexact. This vocabulary misunderstanding is a problem for the Olympic gold medalist representing China who was literally unaware she was committing a crime in China.
Gu should have said,
“Literally anyone outside of China can download a vpn, it’s literally free [and legal] on the App Store for literally anyone outside of China.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing this story, it remains unknown whether Gu has learned the meaning of this word.
[Based on Feb 11, 2022 C/net news article https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/eileen-gus-vpn-comment-reportedly-censored-on-chinese-social-media/]
