Crisitunity

Crisitunity

Should the link above stop working due to its being removed from YouTube, there's an episode of the Simpsons where Lisa tells her father, Homer, that the Chinese word for "crisis" is the same as their word for "opportunity." Homer replies that he does know this, and the word is "crisitunity." Obviously, the portmanteau "crisitunity" is not actually a Chinese word, but how valid is Lisa's claim? After all, politicians and motivational speakers have been making this claim for years. Armed with a very basic knowledge of Chinese (and a little bit of help from this Wikipedia article), I decided to investigate, and found the word for crisis to be Wéijī. You can see the character for it in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1. Wéijī, meaning "crisis," with different elements colored.

Before analyzing this, if you'd like a quick review of how Chinese characters work, check out my previous post here. The first character,  wéi, is colored red and orange. The orange section means "danger" and is actually a picture of a person standing on the edge of a cliff. The orange part beneath it is also a picture of a figure crouching below. It doesn't get much more sinister than that. 

The second character is jī, which also has two components. The green character means "wood," which is why it kind of looks like a tree. The blue part is a picture of a small table. There is a nice idea here, that the wood is an opportunity to make a table. In traditional Chinese The second character would actually be a little bit different, 機. Instead of meaning "table" the second character here means "subtle," which I think provides an equally nice image, that some wood is a subtle opportunity to build something.

So I should probably say right here that this is not the word the Chinese use for "opportunity;" it means and only means "crisis." When you hear that they have the same word for both, you immediately think that it's one word with two meanings (like esperar in Spanish, which means both "to hope" and "to wait"). At the very least you'd hope they the two words were homographs, that is, two words with the same spelling but different meanings. Of course, I think most English speakers would think it odd if someone from another country claimed that Americans have the same word for flying mammals that only come out at night as for what athletes use to hit balls. So what exactly is the word for opportunity in Chinese? I have it below in Figure 2.

 

Figure 2. Jīhuì, meaning "opportunity," with different elements colored.

You will notice that the first character is exactly the same as the second character in wéijī. The second character, huì, generally has to do with meeting or assembling. So assembling your jī is the definition of an opportunity.

Those who argue that "crisis" and "opportunity" are the same word in Chinese point to jī, the common element in both of these words. They say that wéijī could essentially be considered a compound word, something along the lines of danger-opportunity. The problem with this is that jī by itself doesn't really mean opportunity. It also combines to form 机场 (Jīchǎng), which means "airport;" 机密 (Jīmì), which means "secret;" and even 机枪 (Jīqiāng), which means "machine gun." To say that the Chinese have the same word for crisis and opportunity makes about as much sense as saying that they have the same word for opportunity, airport, secret, machine gun, AND crisis. (Although now I realize in writing that sentence that I may just have been put on some kind of list by the TSA).

The second point is that just because a word has a similar root as another doesn't mean that those words have the same meaning, as guitarist Nigel Tufnel learned in This is Spinal Tap.

What's wrong with being sexy?

So as is often the case, know-it-all Lisa Simpson is just spouting information that isn't actually true (like when she claimed the Coriolis effect makes drains run the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere).