During my Chinese lesson with my French student Hélène (aged 71), I was doing my usual literal breakdown of a compound. In this case, the sentence was what a mainland Chinese friend once said of me to my mainland Chinese colleague: “她心很好，脾气不好。” (tā xīn hěn hǎo, píqì bù hǎo / “she heart very good, spleen qì not good” = She’s kind-hearted but bad-tempered.)
(Look online for the different interpretations of qì 气 / 氣 as it’s a bit complex to go into here. The most simplistic take on qì is: it’s the vital energy that flows through our body, and any imbalance in the qì in any part of the body, e.g., one of the organs, will manifest itself in some form, e.g., illness, or, in the case of the comment above, one’s temper.)
Hélène didn’t understand what “spleen” was, and as usual, as a keen learner, when she didn't know a word, she’d immediately go and get her English-French dictionary. She found that it is “la Rate” in French (Rate pronounced like raht, which sounds a bit like rat in English).
A light bulb moment for me: that is why we say someone is ratty when they're bad-tempered and irritable! (cf. "splenetic" in English)
ratty |ˈratē|
adjective ( rattier , rattiest )
1 resembling or characteristic of a rat: his ratty eyes glittered.
• (of a place) infested with rats.
• informal shabby, untidy or in bad condition: a ratty old armchair.
2 [ predic. ] Brit. informal (of a person) bad-tempered and irritable: I was ratty with the children.
DERIVATIVES
rattily |ˈratl-ē|adverb,
rattiness noun
(London, 2015)
Just yesterday I was listening to a radio show where they were talking of "functional medicine" as being the new trend, and this made me think that it may be just traditional Chinese medicine rediscovered...
ReplyDeleteWikipedia says: "Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine which proponents say focuses on interactions between the environment and the gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems while opponents point out that it is a "collection of totally nonsensical gobbledygook". Practitioners develop individual treatment plans for people they treat. Functional medicine encompasses a number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments. It has also been criticized for being pseudoscientific." People tend to pooh-pooh things that haven't been around and accepted for a long time, or things they cannot see (e.g., 气 qì / vital energy; or spirits/ghosts; or the balance of 阴 yīn and 阳 yáng). If by "environment", stress is included, then one can see how true it is to say there's interaction between the environment and the functioning of the body. Ditto pollution (of all forms: noise, air, etc.). TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) comes under this "functional medicine", as you've pointed out, because a lot of things covered in TCM are not fully comprehensible to people brought up on Western medicine: zapping the system with chemicals to kill the germs/bacteria, instead of making up for shortage or taking away surplus -- add yáng if there's too much yīn, say, which is really about bringing about balance. It's like using an ice bag to take away fever, which is the same idea, isn't it?
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