Spring Festival wordplay

BMW Chinese New Year's Greetings

Chinese New Year is a great time for wordplay. New Year's traditions themselves often involve homophones —fish (鱼) for abundance (余) or bat (蝠) for happiness (福), for example.

So it's no surprise that advertisers use similar strategies. Pepsi's annual ad campaign, which features trendy celebrities greeting each other with "We wish you a Pepsi-Cola" (祝你百事可乐), is probably the most visible (here's a video).

The BMW ad on the left, which ran in today's Beijing Youth Daily, hides model numbers in the characters that make up the New Year greeting 新春大吉.

The accompanying text extends other number-related wishes to readers: 3阳开泰 (Good luck in the new Spring), 5福临门 (May your home be filled with the five happinesses), 6六大吉 (may everything go as you wish), and 1路驰骋 (Best wishes for a speedy journey).

If you want to mess around with your own New Year's greetings, Microsoft Research's Natural Language Group has released a web toy that completes antithetical couplets, or duilian (对联).

After you compose a top line, the software will generate several choices for the bottom line that conform to semantic and tonal requirements. You can manipulate word boundaries if you want finer control over the results.

How does it perform?

We entered: 上单位知中国事， “Come to the work unit to learn about China."

One of the replies: 进机关是日本人, "Enter the government agency as a Japanese."

And the lintel banner: 为民服务, "Serve the People."