Notes from my terminal

天高馬肥

Every language has different levels of speech. Teenagers talk and write differently from scholars (especially in Internet chat or when texting with mobiles). In Europe, you scare off people of lesser education by using lots of Latin and Greek words and phrases. In East-Asia, you use classical Chinese four-word-proverbs to show off what great education you received in school. People may not be able to understand you, but that doesn't matter.
These proverbs are always composed with four Chinese characters and can become very cryptic to outsiders (like long-nosed barbarians such as myself). Usually they include obscure references to Confucian legends (孟母三遷 means literally "Mencius' mother, three times moving", but for those who know who Mencius was and why his mother moved to different places with her family, it just means "parents should provide their children with a good education, even if this means hardship for themselves") or Buddhist teachings (牛耳讀涇 "ear of the ox, reading the Buddhist scriptures to it" means "trying to teach a completely stupid and ignorant person") or are otherwise hard to understand, because we simply use a different metaphorical language. A good example is the title of this post. It means "Higher sky, fatter horses". I was reminded of this idiom when looking at the calendar. Without using Google, can you guess what this could mean? Feel free to use the comment feature of this weblog. Posted by jens at September 22, 2003 04:19 PM | TrackBack