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A blog by someone who doesn't like or understand blogs.
A major theme of this blog is the love affair between the blogger and the city of New York.
Email me at david [at] danzig [dot] com.
Bloggers with whom I am personally acquainted, in real life, in alphebetical order by first name:
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Dav C.
David D.
Eva J.
Jessica D.
Joclyn G.
Lauren P.
Sean S.
Steph T.
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Sunday, June 08, 2003
CRISIS = DANGER + OPPORTUNITY.
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We've all heard that thing about how the Chinese word for "crisis" combines the Chinese words for "danger" and "opportunity". That is true, as far as it goes, but I think it's easy to read too much into that. You see, that's just the way Chinese is, combining words from a relatively small pool that are often only tangentially related to the idea they represent. For example, the Chinese word for "breast" is literally the words "milk house". The Chinese word for "uterus" is literally "children's palace". The word for "sofa", which just takes the phonetic sounds "sho" and "fa" without regard to their meanings, literally means "sand hair". Apparently, there are only a few thousand basic words in Chinese, and every other word is a combination of two or more of these.
I've actually been studying Mandarin a little bit lately, but only a very little bit. Most of this stuff above comes from my Shanghainese friend Sophie W.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2003/06/crisis-danger-opportunity.html
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