Chinese characters: 03 (乖 guāi)

 

乖 guāi is most commonly encountered in daily / colloquial language, meaning to be obedient and well behaved, as in a child’s behaviour, but also occasionally said in irony of a spouse, especially a male one (i.e., he doesn’t have a roving eye [or not to his wife’s knowledge anyway…]).

    Yet, in literary usage, it means perverse!

(From googling)

• 形容词: 机灵；伶俐。(Google translate) (adjective) Smart; clever.
• 形容词: (小孩儿) 不淘气；听话。(Google translate) (adjective) (child) not naughty; obedient.

(Literary usage)

• 动词: 违背。(Google translate) (verb) violate
• 形容词: (性情、行为) 不正常；不合情理。(Google translate) (adjective) (temperament, behavior) abnormal; unreasonable

Students' versions are much more fun: 1 (London)

My style of teaching is to challenge the student as much as possible, e.g., make them work out the meaning of a compound or phrase by breaking it down into the individual components and arriving at the final meaning that way.

One of those phrases is 可有可無 / 可有可无 kě yǒu kě wú / “can have can not-have”, which the Mac dictionary gives as “be as well without it as with it” and another, online dictionary gives as “it doesn’t matter whether one has it or not”, i.e., one can take it or leave it, it’s dispensable.  An example would be: "Some people cannot do without coffee.  For me, it's 可有可無 / 可有可无."

When I asked David M what he thought it meant and when it might be used, he said, “Perhaps, say, used by a greengrocer, replying to your asking if they have any apples: ‘可有可無 / 可有可无。Maybe we do, maybe we don’t.’”  

I collapsed in fits of laughter.  What a perverse greengrocer, being so cagey about whether they might have apples or not!  

(David is a mature student, not a teenager whose general knowledge of life might be a bit more limited and whose imagination might run a bit wilder than adults’.)

(London, 2017)