well-traveled snowclone

[Ben Zimmer]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  An old business snowclone involves the alleged danger/opportunity or
> risk/opportunity duality in a single character. Another version that
> made it into Tom Wolfe's novels is that the Chinese word for "crisis" is
> composed of two symbols--for danger and for opportunity.
>
> Language Log had covered this before:
>
> http://bit.ly/c9HFXl
>
> with a nod to a more direct debunking
>
> http://bit.ly/cWaoWs
>
> This morning, on Colorado Public Radio, Tom Tancredo invented yet
> another version:
>
> "Chinese symbol for opportunity and problem is the same symbol."

For historical background on the spread of the trope, both in its
"crisis = danger + opportunity" and "crisis = opportunity" variants,
see my Language Log post:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004343.html

Related posts listed here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1212

--bgz


--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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