I love this thread.
She’s gone bing bing biang biang with the makeup, that’s for sure.
And here’s a recent article about a Malaysian (?) singer, who, responding to criticism about her lackluster performance, states that she can’t have “bing bing biang biang” every week:
I unfortunately only found the text article, not a video of the phrase being spoken.
It was painful to sit through China Mandarin, but I found it and time coded it to Li about to give her response. She gave it with a very SEA Hokkien flavored rendition of pìn-pìn-piàng-piàng.
Great find! How did you find it? I did copy-pasting of various phrases from the original article (including the artist’s name) into a search engine, but came up empty.
It’s also interesting that the original article, written in simplified Chinese, writes “bing bing biang biang” instead of “乒乒乓乓”.
It’s ㄅㄧㄥˇㄅㄧㄥ ㄅㄧㄤˋㄅㄧㄤˇ. We don’t pronounce it in standard mandarin and I’m not sure if there’s a correct Chinese character for each words. Not even sure if it’s mandarin.
I think it’s an onomatopoeia, very similar to 乒乒乓乓. The term resembles loud noises or rowdy environments as if we’re celebrating with gongs or stuff like that. Sometimes it has the same meaning as 嚇嚇叫 (outdated), like, 不錯喔，弄得屏冰棒綁 (doing really good).
It’s probably the TV station’s lack of Hokkien knowledge, also 乒乒乓乓 in Mandarin would be ping-ping-pang-pang in Pinyin, so TV stations in China probably didn’t want to give credence, i.e. assigning Hanji, to what they consider as just a dialect. Finally, 乒乒乓乓 in Mandarin just represents loud noises or the making of loud noises, and doesn’t have the extended meaning of infecting flare or festivity into something as you’d find in Taigi or Hokkien.
He-he-kiò is also borrowed from Taigi into Mandarin. It’s just that in He-he-kiò’s case, Mandarin also co-opted it’s pronunciation, while pìn-pìn-piàng-piàng largely maintained it’s pronunciation even when used in Mandarin sentences. It’s not through a lack of trying either. Mandarin speakers tried to hijack the pronunciation to become bing4-bing4-bong4-bong4, which is still heard sometimes.
Trump obviously speaks fluent Mandarin, and whatever mystery language covfefe came from.
I think ping4-ping4-pong4-pong4 is also another Mandarin rendering of pìn-pìn-piàng-piàng.