Gossip & 八卦 (chop suey)

I remember once I watched a talk show on TV, where a woman talked about how she relaxed herself by drinking coffee and gossiping with her girlfriends. “Oh, what a 三姑六婆(san gu liu4 puo2)*¹!” I thought to myself. Then I remember how I always giggle with Mary, the teacher sitting next to me at the office, when we are talking about the private affairs of others. Yeah, we sure get so much pleasure from gossiping, or what we call八卦(ba gua4) these days.

Funny how we now use the term八卦 to refer to those gossips, if you know it used to be something that was so different. According to Wikipedia, 八卦are “eight diagrams used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. They are often referred to as "trigrams" in English.”

As to the origin for this change, there are different sayings, which is not my concern here. I just hope you won’t misunderstand when they are mentioned to mean different things. That’s something you have to know about a language when part of it has changed from the usage of the past.

Another example I’d like to give you is 三字經(san zi4 jing), Three Character Classic, one of the classic texts that kids used to learn and memorize when starting school. Almost every Chinese can chant the beginning of it, 人之初, 性本善. . . (ren2 zhi chu, xing4 ben3 shan4) (Humans are good-natured when they were born.) The famous story of 孟母三遷(men4 mu3 san qian) as I put in my previous writing “The tiger mothers in the Chinese history” is recorded from the 9^th to 12^th sentences*². It’s called三字經 because every sentence is composed of three characters, which is easy for young children to memorize.

But when Sean Lien claimed he heard the murderer call his name and use 三字經 before he shot him last November*³, don’t get mixed up. Here the 三字經 is not the三字經 we used to teach the kids. Like 八卦, it has a modern version of different meaning. It changes into what you call “four-letter words” when people swear, a lot of which happen to be of three characters.  

It reminds me how we used to praise a learned man who speaks beautifully with eloquence by calling him 出口成章 (chu kou3 cheng2 zhang). But now we might call a man who loves to swear 出口成髒 (chu kou3 cheng2 zang). For 髒 as in 髒話(zang hua4), meaning four-letter words, sounds like 章, literary elegance.

So, next time when someone says to you, “你真八卦(ni3 zhen ba gua4)*⁴!” or “ 別罵三字經(bie2 ma4 san zi4 jing)^*5!” Don’t get him wrong.  

As to the Xiehouyu I left to you before the Chinese New Year,豬八戒擦粉(zhu ba jie4 ca fen3) Zhu ba jie powders his face, what does it mean exactly? For an ugly pig like zhu ba jie, does it cover up his ugliness to powder his face? Unfortunately no. This xiehouyu can refer to the fruitless effort to hide something you don’t want to show. It’s like 豬八戒擦粉(zhu ba jie4 ca fen3)，遮不了醜 (zhe bu4 liao3 chou3)

 

*1.三姑六婆Please check out my previous writing “Stop talking about the five four three” to see what it means.

*2.昔孟母。 擇鄰處。 子不學。 斷機杼

=昔孟母。 择邻处。 子不学。 断机杼

*3. Please refer to my previous writing 羊入虎口 for more details of the shooting case.

*4. 你真八卦: You’re so full of gossips.

*5. 別罵三字經=别骂三字经: Don’t swear.

髒話=脏话

豬八戒擦粉，遮不了醜=猪八戒擦粉，遮不了丑

遮不了醜: can’t cover up the ugliness