瞎貓撞到死老鼠
xiā māo zhuàng-dào sǐ lǎoshǔ
“blind cat to-bump-reach dead mouse”
This means the cat had only run into the dead mouse, it didn't kill/catch the mouse, being blind. It’s used to disclaim the credit given to one, i.e., one had only solved the problem serendipitously.
Old friend Valerio put a test to me in our WhatsApp message exchanges just now. It’d started with him telling me one big chunk in my Introduction to the animal collection stories that I’ve been meaning to self-publish is too long for putting within parentheses. I added as a btw cultural/linguistic practice note that the Chinese reader skips anything within parentheses because it means extra information, therefore optional. Valerio the Maths Professor then says that the asterisk in Maths plays that role.
So, he then moved on to: how to, in WhatsApp messaging, make two stars on either side of a word/sentence appear without emboldening the word/sentence (with the star not showing up, being there only for the emboldening command).
I fiddled around and got there somehow, based on the 負負得正 / 负负得正 fù fù dé zhèng / “reverse reverse get upright” / two-negatives-make-a-positive principle.
Valerio said he had to Google it (and it’s less simple than my method), so he was impressed I got there.
My response to this is:
瞎貓撞到死老鼠
xiā māo zhuàng-dào sǐ lǎoshǔ
“blind cat to-bump-reach dead mouse”
(London, 2023)
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