Tool of the Day

One thing that struck us about the crowd at the Highland Games was the number of middle-aged people with tattoos, particularly character tattoos. I'm accustomed to seeing these all over the bodies of younger folk, but I don't generally expect to spy a fortyish suburban women with 和 on her calf.

Most of the characters were of the same generic ilk, but I was baffled by a tat which read 否怖 fǒubù. The first character is one used for "no" on official forms; the second one I didn't know but guessed the pronunciation of based on the phonetic, 布 bù. This literally means "cloth", but it often shows up in transliterations (e.g. 布什 bùshí "[President] Bush"), so I wasted some time trying to figure out what "Foboo" could possibly mean in English. Some cutesy nickname? I looked it up when I got home and found out that it means "to frighten" or "to terrify" (as in 恐佈份子 kǒngbùfènzi "terrorist"). Then the penny dropped: It was a word-for-word translation of "No fear".

In Chinese, it's nonsense, of course. There are several negative particles in Chinese, each with their own use, and 否 fǒu simply can't be used in this way. In Ancient Chinese, it was used to express negation of a predicate where the verb was understood, e.g. 義則進否則奉身而退 yì zé jìn fǒu zé fèng shēn ér tuì "[If he] is.right then [he] entres; [if] not then [he] holds.back [his] body and withdraws." (左傳 Zuǒzhuàn) In this example, 否 fǒu replaces 不義 bù yì "not be.right". 否義 fǒu yì would have an entirely different meaning, something like "not do [something] to righteousness". (Since Chinese repeats the verb in negative responses, you can see how a character meaning "not do/be so" would come to be used as a generic "no".)

If the intention is "Don't be afraid", then one needs a negative imperative, e.g. Modern Standard Chinese 別 bié "do.not". But I suspect he wanted something like "I have no fear", in which case the best translation would probably've been 無畏 wú wèi, the first character being the Literary Chinese for "there is not" and the second an elegant word for "fear". Other translations would work, but they'd be less refined and concise.

If I'd thought to get monshu's camera, I would've snapped a picture for Hanzi Smatter, but, alas, I didn't think of it until well after the fact.

新辭

宰
手機
燒機
無畏
拌飯
饃
脾氣

Edit: Perhaps I should explain. Periodically, to reassure myself that I actually do learn and retain new words in the languages I'm studying, I quiz myself by writing down all the vocabulary I remember picking up in the past few days. (If you click on the "vocabulary" tag, you'll find some earlier instances.)

I've explained two of these terms below. The others which are not self-evident are 宰 zǎi, which does have the primary meaning of "butcher", but in slang means "rip off, gouge"; and 拌飯 bànfàn, which is the Chinese for 비빔밥 bibimbap. (Both names translate as "mixed cooked.rice".)