The Chinese word for crisis

Perhaps you've heard in a speech somwhere that the Chinese word for crisis has two characters: one for "danger" and the other for "opportunity."

(For those who are curious, the simplified characters are off to the right. It's 危機 in traditional characters. The pronunciation is "wēi jī.")

While that explanation is popular with public speakers and technically true, the concept of it having some deep meaning is entirely a Western thing. Source. Chinese don't think of things that way. They see the second character as meaning something more like "moment."

The best way I can explain it is this:

Animals and corn both have ears. If you look in a dictionary, you'll see both definitions. But to draw some parallel between the two words is silly -- the kind of thing that comes up only in children's jokes. It's not like anyone's ever looked at a corn stalk and then preached to the world about how we need to be better listeners. Yet that's what's happened with the "crisis" thing.

In English, it's only by linguistic coincidence that today corn ears are spelled the same as the ones for hearing. The latter comes from Old English "ēare"; the former from "ēar." Source. It's a small thing really, not quite as big as the difference between "sit" and "s*it," but it highlights the importance of understanding etymology.

Assigning some deep meaning to a character is a dangerous thing -- one that's best left to Chinese people. For example, the character "和" more often used as "and" than "harmony." Then again, if people knew that I doubt tattoo artists would get as many orders as they do.

If I were Chinese, I'd make a bunch of T-shirts with "monkey butt" written on them and sell them on eBay. Then I could sit back, relax, and laugh my own butt off at all the people who buy them.