The death of the 'taikonaut'

One of the most frustrating aspects of the voice recording work I often do here to earn extra pocket money is that, although we are usually encouraged to make corrections to the (often numerous) blunders, omissions, and 'Chinglish' inelegancies in the scripts we are given to read, we know with a numbing certainty that - 95% of the time at least - our efforts on this are completely disregarded.

However, occasionally, just occasionally, we take encouragement from a signal success. One of the strangest of these is the death of the word 'taikonaut'.

When China achieved its first successful manned space missions with the Shenzhou V and Shenzhou VI capsules, the country was understandably proud of the achievement, and the returning spacemen were feted as national heroes. Someone in the Propaganda Ministry (I assume) thought that patriotic pride would be further boosted by creating a novel and distinctively Chinese word to designate these brave explorers; if the Americans could call their spacemen 'astronauts', while the Russians had 'cosmonauts', then why shouldn't China have 'taikonauts' (from the Chinese expression for 'Outer Space', tai kong)? Well, sorry, because nobody else is going to take any notice of you. 'Taikonaut' wasn't exactly Chinglish, but it was a silly piece of national vanity that never had much chance of insinuating itself into worldwide English usage.

For a while, though, it was ubiquitous in all the local English-language media over here. And in the scripts we got given to read in the recording booth!

One of my regular recording partners, a bluff Yorkshire lass called Cath, who is notorious for correcting rather more than the rest of us, developed a violent antipathy to the word. It was for her something far, far more than a pet peeve: she would pour withering scorn on it every time she encountered the word, and always insisted on replacing it with 'astronaut'.

And you know what? SHE'S WON. Just lately, we've been getting a rash of articles and dialogues about the Shenzhou missions again..... and China's space heroes are now being called simply 'astronauts'. I don't read China Daily and so on often enough to have clocked if they've given up on 'taikonaut' too, but I rather suspect that they have. I wonder if a high-level decision was taken to abandon the word, or if it simply succumbed to the ruthless Darwinism of daily usage in a vibrant language.

There is probably a very interesting story behind its demise, but I, alas, am not the man to tell it. I feel, though, that our Cath should get some credit for the extirpation of this unnecessary word.