Sometimes news rolling in can have two dramatically different twists to the tale. CNNIC, being China’s official network info centre (and indeed, the “domain censor”), recently secured the OK from the ICANN when it came to the new TLD (top-level domain) .zhongguo — in essence, “China” but in pinyinese. (The all-characters variant, .中国, was already in place.

The Shanghaiist derided it as useless. This blog somehow agrees. When Deng Xiaoping was in office, China gave birth to — yep — the short-lived lingo your blogger likes to think of as pinyinese. It was a big thing — with boxes of cosmetics dedicating part of their packaging to an all-out product description in pinyin romanization — neither English nor Chinese characters. It looked like this: Pinyin hua jiushi zheme xiezhe de… that’s right: can you read that?

One wonders if anyone would want to type in shanghaishibohui.zhongguo (in essence Shanghai World Expo.China in English or 上海世博会.中国 in Chinese) when expo2010.cn is much shorter…

Oh crap, that didn’t work…