胡同机器人

kaopu (pronunciation: “cow-pooh”), a prominent word in the robot’s vocabulary, is a vernacular term to describe a person, thing, behavior or event as dependable or reliable.

It is often used in the negative, but in recent years the affirmative usage seems to be gaining popularity. It’s a very hutong-ish word, and has also come to have a more general sense of “good” or “worthy of one’s trust.”

The word is constructed from two characters: kao – “according to” or “close to” and pu – “musical score”, “book” or “family tree.” I’ve heard various competing etymologies for the word, but part of its charm and popularity seems to be the mystery surrounding its origin and adaptability to varied situations.

The robot uses the word kaopu a lot, and he has great hopes the word might eventually enter the world’s international vocabulary.

In the robot’s vocabulary, situations can be defined generally as fitting one of these four levels of kaopu-ness

• 忒靠谱： teikaopu (extremely kaopu)

• 靠谱: kaopu

• 不靠谱: bu kaopu

• 严重不靠谱: yanzhong bu kaopu (seriously not kaopu)

My friend Steve in the land once ruled by Queen Califia asked me to define “hutong” for him. Obviously, this is crucial in understanding the exact nature of a hutong robot. (Btw, a glossary of terms used on this site is forthcoming. *Memo to linguistic gizmos department.)

The Chinese word hutong is, as I understand it, derived from a Mongolian word that means “well,” — as in the kind that have water, as opposed to the well in the “oh, well, there goes the hutong to yet another wrecking crew.”  In modern Chinese, hutong means “alley” or “small street” or “something disappearing rapidly from Beijing’s urban cultural ecology.” Here’s the Wikipedia definition.

Hutongs are also excellent ecological niches for cats, ferrets and stray robots to find adequate hiding places.