Plastic waste, plastic bans, microplasticsin the sea – the material plastic has a rather bad image in everyday language thesedays. The term „plastic Chinese“ therefore does not bode well. And indeed: the new trendy word, which is composed of the Chinese words for „plastic“ (塑料 sùliào) and „high/standard language“ (普通话 pǔtōnghuà), is the unflattering name for bumpy high Chinese with a clear dialectal touch. The neologism is based on the jargon of the gaming scene, where certain players are ranked as bronze, silver, gold, platinum or diamond players, depending on their level of play. Plastic players, on the other hand, run a distant second. We know similar categorizations traditionally with wedding anniversaries: silver wedding (25 years of marriage), golden wedding (50 years of marriage), diamond wedding (60 years of marriage). The plastic wedding, on the other hand: 2 years. But that’s just a mnemonic.