>> I’ve collected names from the sublime—Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name
>Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.
Probably not, although "beautifully phonetic [...] rendering" is a bit of a stretch: only her given name is phonetically rendered.
Whoever advised her on taking the name probably didn't know the Japanese colloquial meaning of 金玉, but was referencing the Chinese idiom 金玉滿堂[0]. It probably sounded good to Swanson because she's deeply concerned about poverty[1], but it feels like gilding the lily, because the whole name literally means "gold-and-jade goose/swan" (鹅 is probably referring to the "swan" in "Swanson", but "goose" seems to be what people landed upon in this thread).
>Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.
Probably not, although "beautifully phonetic [...] rendering" is a bit of a stretch: only her given name is phonetically rendered.
Whoever advised her on taking the name probably didn't know the Japanese colloquial meaning of 金玉, but was referencing the Chinese idiom 金玉滿堂[0]. It probably sounded good to Swanson because she's deeply concerned about poverty[1], but it feels like gilding the lily, because the whole name literally means "gold-and-jade goose/swan" (鹅 is probably referring to the "swan" in "Swanson", but "goose" seems to be what people landed upon in this thread).
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89%E6%BB%BF%E...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Swanson