China Can Say "D'oh!"

By Weining Liu
From the Chinese Community Forum, issue #9650
Wednesday, October 16, 1996

"D'oh!", as every erudite man knows, is the word of choice and instinctual recall of American folk hero Homer J. Simpson. Whenever confounded by life's complexity, regrets, fumbles, and follies, Homer has an universal answer to them all. Forcefully yet matter-of-factly, he thunders thus: D'OH!

A man not yet in mastery of Homer's simplicity, I have deviously sought the deeper philosophical meaning of this word, so captivating that it must rank as one of the most frequently uttered on the Internet. After wrecking my train of thought in a d'oh-ful collision, I think I have finally got it and would like to share with my esteemed CCF readers before publicizing the idea to the world.

I was duped by my English teacher into believing that English is a rich and subtle language. It is not. At least not until "d'oh" is enshrined in every major English dictionary. Let us see why this incorporation is desirable and even necessary.

Questions of judgment, as we all know, are usually posed in the binary form in English: you are expected to answer "yes" or "no." Later, as man became more sophisticated, "perhaps" and "maybe" entered the fray -- words of ambivalence, coyness, or genuine indetermination. However, I find something wanting here. To answer yes or no presupposes that you understand the question; only then can your choice of binary number have validity, not a random blip of noise, so to speak. "Perhaps" or "maybe" is the darling of bourgeoisie.

How it can work in real life is unclear. For example, your computer works through the operation of yes and no; a machine out of "maybe principle," a thing of active imagination, has not panned out as anything tangible yet. Unfortunately, because there is God (or else life is not eternal), we cannot be all-knowing (or omniscient, if you are bourgeois with words). There is an infinitude of questions we don't understand. English, of course, does offer a coping strategy with the suggested answer: "I don't understand the question." But this is unromantic and, worse, may imply certain ineptitude on the part of the questioner for not being able to phrase the question more smartly. Hence my proposal to Webster and every major English department in the world: use "d'oh" in this situation -- a word of unabashed declaration: "I am stupid, OK?"

Yet, the word is not without profundity. It transcends the bondage of yes or no; the tyranny of logic; the prison of facts; the toil of learning -- it makes a man proud, yet unpredictable. Take the case of computer again. After days of painstaking labor and midnight oil, you have strung together a code of a thousand lines, religiously catering to the computer's appetite for yes and no. But the code does not work. If you are bourgeois, you would probably mutter: "'perhaps' there are bugs; 'maybe' I will work on it tomorrow." However, if you are a proletarian like Homer, you would be inclined to swear: "D'oh! I gotta kick the shit out of this sucker and see if it can say no again." Frequently, Homer wins.

Thus, an authoritative definition of "d'oh" would be something like this:

China (here I mean the Chinese government) can use a healthy dose of d'oh, in both canonical forms. Mr. Jiang Ze-min, for example, is a D'oh!ist of the first kind; his fumbling before the question is a reflection of a murky mind. "Talk politics," what a d'oh answer to the pressing questions facing China.

In other cases, d'oh of the second kind can be useful. Take the recent fuss over Diao Yu Tai for example. Mr. Qian Qi-chen, either too slow or too inarticulate to spell out his geopolitical calculations, could have simply resorted to a "d'oh" in his answer to reporters' questions. Such an answer would be so enigmatic, menacing, carry so indeterminate a multitude of possible intentions, that the Japanese, at the very minimum, would have spent some real effort in trying to figure out the Chinese, rather than doing what they have been doing, couching complacently on the secure knowledge that China will play by their rules.

It is no secret to us that the Chinese ruling class has "d'ohed" (in the first sense) on uncountably many occasions; they just haven't literally spoken the word. It's time that they do. As some of us might wish, the same ruling class should d'oh in the second sense. It' time for them to do that, too.

And one last thing. Modesty, Mr. Jiang, is a multiplying virtue. Your English, we all know, is a dud worthy a d'oh. So be humble. Watch a few episodes of The Simpsons; get a English coach if necessary. The point is: learn to say d'oh as well as Homer. It is not a matter of preparing for a second career in standup comedy, as you might think. Just imagine the joy of reducing the loquacious Mr. Clinton into a wordless confusion with your simple, insistent d'oh, d'oh, d'oh in your future rounds of negotiation.

As Chairman Mao says: "only D'oh!ism can save China."