Jason writes:
Hey Kevin,
I ran across a fine post on the Pinyin News blog about the claim going around regarding of the etymology Chinese character 忙 (busy). Be sure to also read the linked take-down of the oft-quoted-but-utterly-wrong bullshit about the "Chinese word for 'crisis' also means 'opportunity'".
And your brother's photo from the mall? Definitely the Jolly Green Giant's left testicle.
-Jason
PS: You might also want to read this story from the Taipei Times, but only after you've eaten.
I've heard about the argument against the etymology of "crisis." In Sino-Korean, the word is pronounced "wigi," with a hard "g." Unless I'm mistaken, the "wi" is from the character meaning "danger" (as in the word wi-heom, "danger") and the "gi" is from the character meaning "opportunity" (as in gi-hwae, "opportunity"). Two Korean online dictionaries support this. What follows is information compiled from both. The Korean is from the Yahoo! Korean dictionary; the first three parentheticals are my own, and the final parenthetical is based on definitions in both the Yahoo! online Korean dictionary and the Naver online dictionary.
危機 (wigi, as written in hanja)
위기 (wigi, as written in Hangeul)
위험한 고비. 위급한 기회. (wiheom-han gobi; wigeup-han gi-hwae)
(Translation:
Dangerous turning point/climax; critical/dangerous/crucial opportunity.)
UPDATE: Having now visited Jason's link, and having followed it back to the "crisis" essay, I see that it's the same essay by Victor Mair I had read a long while back. Mair has a point, and I suppose that, if we look carefully at the spread of meanings offered by the Korean dictionaries, we can see that they were trying to capture the characters' entire semantic fields without regard to how the characters' meanings change when they are treated as bound nouns. That's not really the fault of the online lexicographers, who in my opinion did a good job of giving us anglophones a "feel" for the characters in question. But by taking the generalist approach, the Korean dictionaries obviously miss out on the gi-hwae to explain subtle nuances.
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