From: "Karl M. Bunday" <bunda002@gold.tc.umn.edu> Newsgroups: alt.quotations Date: Sun, 05 May 1996 01:33:20 -0500Stephen E. DeLong wrote: >
> I am trying to determine the origin of, or even a published
> attribution to, what is usually described as "an ancient Chinese
> curse":
>
> May you live in interesting times.
>
> A search on Alta Vista gives well in excess of 100 hits, none of which
> seem to be any help. The one interesting discovery that I made was a
> hit in which Keith Henson said that the line above is only the opening
> of a longer version:
>
> May you live in interesting times and come to the attention of
> important people.
>
> I know one American who spent time in China asking about the (short
> version of the) phrase and found no one familiar with it at all, let
> alone its origin! I have also spoken with two Chinese students here
> at Albany who have never heard the expression.
Most attributions of proverbial sayings to China are erroneous. I majored in Chinese in college and have spent the last twenty years speaking the language. I NEVER hear any Chinese people saying any of the "Chinese proverbs" that show up in poorly edited quotation compilations. I own several HUGE dictionaries of Chinese proverbial sayings, but those sayings are all unknown in the West. I suspect the curse you mention is spuriously thought to be Chinese, in part because of how Chinese expresses the term "interesting."
The most common Chinese curse I used to hear when I lived in Taiwan for three years a decade ago was "Your mother's . . ." I've never been told exactly what the always omitted, understood-by-all term is [grin].
-- Karl from Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Homeschoolers bunda002@gold.tc.umn.edu http://198.83.19.39/School_is_dead/Learn_in_freedom.html (enjoying this newsgroup; I have quotations galore at my Web site)
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