One of my students, Judith Morris, on the evening programme was a retired senior lady who had done a degree in Chinese at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) in the 1950s. Like Oxbridge, they only did classical Chinese in those days, so she came to my evening classes for the modern side of the language.
In one of her homework, I found a recurring word translated differently each time, so I wrote the comment: “You’re not even consistent in your mistakes!”
She said, “I was hedging my bets. If I was wrong about one particular rendition, then I’d get all of them wrong. The way I’d done it, I might at least get one of them right.”
(London, 1990s)
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