Posts by Sam Duncan

There’s a phrase "一个和尚挑水吃，两个和尚抬水吃，三个和尚没水吃"*. It means “one monk can carry drinking water [balancing a pole and buckets on his back], two monks can carry drinking water [lifting the buckets together], three monks have no water to drink." It can refer to the diluted sense of responsibility felt by people in crowds to take action, or to encourage you to be self-reliant.

I really like these creative symbols made up of characters and pictures, at Dalian Library. The one on the left is 烟 yān, which means smoke, and they’ve used a cigarette to draw part of the fire radical. In the picture on the right they've combined the character 静 jìng (part of the word 安静 ānjìng – quiet) with a picture of a phone. Below it is 嘘 xū, which represents the “Shh!" sound, with a hushed mouth to replace the mouth radical. Very clever.

When giving cars Chinese names, many brands opt for 马 (mǎ), the character for horse, such as the well-known 宝马 (bǎomǎ – BMW or "treasure horse"), Mazda (马自达 – mǎzìdá), whose use of 马 seems to be phonetic, and Aston Martin 阿斯顿·马丁 (āsīdùn·mǎdīng). 马 also appears as a meaning radical in the second character of the name for Mercedes Benz, 奔驰 (bēnchí) – which is, appropriately, a word meaning “to run quickly, speed, or gallop”.

Ladybird/bug/beetle in Chinese is 瓢虫 (piáo ​chóng)​, and 瓢 (piáo) means ladle made from a gourd – the type used to scoop up water or small amounts of grain. I’m sure that the use of 瓢 in 瓢虫 is down to the similarity in shape between the tool and the shell of the ladybird, but it’s funny that the English translation, ladle, sounds like a mispronunciation of lady.