11 September 2016 (Sunday) – online

Dr Lisa Lim, Associate Professor in the School of English, explains how Hong Kong’s 2014 pro-democracy protests popularised the phrase ‘add oil’ in her fortnightly Post Magazine column: Language Matters.

“At the height of Hong Kong’s 2014 pro-democracy protests, media artists launched a website for world-wide messages of support to be sent to protesters, displayed in real-time online, and projected onto buildings at protest sites. That they named the initiative the “Add Oil Machine for OCLP [Occupy Central with Love and Peace]” marked a significant step in the evolution of English in Cantonese-dominant Hong Kong.

An expression of exhortation in Cantonese, 加油 (ga1yau4; “add/increase fuel”) is well known to Hongkongers, originating as a Macau Grand Prix chant during the 1960s and now used to cheer a team on or as encouragement in challenging times – exams, physical exertion, boyfriend trouble. In the past decade, the English phrase “add oil”, a word-for-word translation from Cantonese – just as “Devil’s advocate” and “by heart” are Latin and French calques – has gained prominence among young bilingual Hongkongers, but solely in computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as SMS, online chat or on social media.”

Please click on the following link for the complete article:
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/2017763/how-2014-hong-kong-protests-popularised-phrase

Oil being added during the 1968 Macau Grand Prix. Source: SCMP