Noncompositional

Al Gore appeared on Larry King Live today and spread vicious lies about Chinese lexical semantics. In his book, he writes,

As many know, the Chinese expression for “crisis” consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for “danger,” the second the symbol for “opportunity.” (taken from an npr interview, though he basically repeated it on the show)

He should know that the worldwide scientific consensus is that the Chinese word (”expression”) for ‘crisis’ absolutely does not have this meaning. Oy. Blog posts over the past few months covering his book and movie help perpetuate the myth (though untrue, using it probably has some rhetorical payoff), even getting wrong what Gore gets right: that the word consists of two characters. Ethan Zuckerman at WorldChanging says: “He quotes the old saw that the Chinese character for crisis includes signs for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity.’” Similarly, JD Lasica at New Media Musings wrote: the Chinese symbol for crisis [is] a symbol that epitomizes tragedy on one side but opportunity on the other. Of course, some blogs get it right, and some people replied to posts with the correct information. And of course Language Log has coverage.

This reminds me of people in grade and high school constantly misspelling my name, even while looking at a correct version and copying it onto a piece of paper

[inevitably this post will fall into line with Hartman's law...]