Two anecdotes I translated in my Classical Chinese studies today:
a)
There was a guy in Qi named Feng Xuan who was unemployed and dirt poor. He asked someone to get him in good with Lord Meng Chang and land him a cushy job as a flunky.
Lord Meng Chang asked the go-between "is this guy any fun?"
"He's not any fun."
"Well... is he any use?"
"He's pretty useless."
The lord laughed and said "yeah, sure, whatever. Hired."
b)
Han Jue was driving his chariot in hot pursuit of the Lord of Qi. The lord's own driver said "shoot that guy behind us! He's a nobleman!"
The Lord of Qi answered, "calling him a noble man and then shooting him isn't very polite!"
(The dual political/moral meaning works in Chinese, too!)
#classicalchinese #translation
I am very amused to have spotted a random app that consistently misspelled the "--quiet" option (as the opposite of verbose) as "--quite" in both the code and the documentation.
quite, my lad! quite indeed!
