Recently I watched a show on TV where several fashion stylists were competing for the title of best stylist. They had to do some designs for an actor within limited time. One of the stylists was so anxious that she literally ran around the place attempting to finish her design. After the contest she repeated several times calling herself a “headless chicken.”
Coincidentally we have a similar expression when someone is doing something very quickly without thinking carefully and doing it in
an unorganized way. Instead of a chicken, we use a fly. We’ll say “He’s acting like a headless fly.” 無頭蒼蠅 (wu2 tou2 cang ying2)
Not only a fly can be headless, a case can be “headless.” When something seems to be mysterious and hard to be figured out or solved, we’ll call it a無頭公案(wu2 tou2 gong ai4), “a headless case.” For example, the “Two Bullets Incident” on the afternoon before Taiwan’s 2004 presidential election is probably one of the biggest contemporary 無頭公案that Taiwanese are yearning to dig in.
It is called headless because when we try to figure out something by reorganizing it, we’ll say we’re trying to 理出頭緒(li3 chu tou2 xu4)， finding out the head of a strand of thread. It’s similar with English. When you don’t understand someone’s talk, you might say “I can’t make head or tail of it.” A case that you can’t figure out thus becomes “headless.”
During the late 20th Century, a type of humor originating from Hong Kong movies is called無厘頭(wu2 li2 tou2) or in Cantonese dialect Mo Lei tau. According to Wikipedia, “typical constituents of this humor include nonsensical parodies, juxtaposition of contrasts, sudden surprises in spoken dialogue and action and improbable and deliberate anachronisms.”
The slang “acting like a headless chicken” also reminds me of an old ritual in Taiwan
Such a ritual was often seen during the election campaign two or three decades ago. When a candidate was accused of corruption or flaws alike, he might go to the temple with a cock. He burned a incense, knelt down before the shrine, reading out loud his oath on a yellow paper. Then he took a knife and chopped off the head of the cock on a cutting board, letting the blood of the cock sprinkle on the yellow paper. Then the paper was burned and the ritual was done.
These days people tend to resort to judicial procedure instead of斬雞頭. Otherwise we’ll have lots of “headless chickens” these days with the presidential campaign heating up.
頭蒼蠅=无头苍蝇
理出頭緒=理出头绪
無厘頭=无厘头
斬雞頭=斩鸡头
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