Lexicon. From the movie Titanic:
“(Captain Smith) figures anything big enough to sink the ship they’re going to see in time to turn. But the ship’s too big, with too small a rudder… it can’t corner worth shit. Everything he knows is wrong.”
Not so much a misquote, as a paraphrase. “Your rudder is too small,” means you don’t have enough resources for the task at hand. Thus:
“I really think I can learn general relativity from this Mandarin textbook in six weeks.”
”Your rudder is too small.”
From the Analects of Kǒng Fūzǐ (15:19), who is frequently Anglicized as Confucius:
Ames & Rosemont: The Master said, “Exemplary persons are distressed by their own lack of ability, not by the failure of others to acknowledge them.”
Lyall (Proj. Gutenberg): The Master said, His shortcomings trouble a gentleman; to be unknown does not trouble him.
Legge: The Master said, “The superior man is distressed by his want of ability. He is not distressed by men’s not knowing him.”
A. Charles Muller: The Master said: “The noble man suffers from his own lack of ability, not from lack of recognition.”
So the next time you’re thinking you don’t get enough comments…
Oh, boy, is this Lexicon.
Yet Another Movie About Dorks. The principle lurking behind YAMAD is, no matter how stupid, or clutzy, or socially inept you may feel, here’s a movie (or TV series, these days) about people stupider, less graceful, etc., so a broad audience can look down on them.
Origin: There we were, dear reader, at one of our weekly movies (we cut the cord before a whole lot of people) in 1998. We were being subjected to a trailer for A Night at the Roxbury for the 35th time. It was obvious this thing was incredibly stupid. It was obvious it was going to flop. But still, some studio exec had greenlit spending $17M of budget to make and market this steaming turd.
Why? Who did they expect to show up?
Possibly fans of Will Farrell, the Godfather of YAMAD. Chris Kattan, the co-star, never really showed up too much after this. (I mean, Sharknado 5?)
No, this is a movie of consolation. No matter how bad your life is, here are some clowns who are even worse. Dumb and Dumber is YAMAD. Wayne’s World. Anchorman. Kevin Smith is the Orson Welles of YAMAD — his characters are dumb on the surface, but there’s more there than you think.
Kardashians is YAMAD plus money. Most descendants of Candid Camera (think Ridiculousness on MTV; or nearly all of MTV, these days) are YAMAD plus voyeurism.
No big summation. “I alone escaped to tell thee.”
Lexicon. This comes from a phonetic rendering of the word “Facebook” into Mandarin, and then translating the characters back into English.
Fēi sǐ bù kě
This is reminiscent of what Paul Linebarger (who also wrote science fiction as Cordwainer Smith) did during the Korean War:
While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for ‘love,’ ‘duty,’ ‘humanity,’ and ‘virtue’–words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like ‘I surrender’ in English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.
Linebarger here is Paul Linebarger, the real name of Cordwainer Smith. The Chinese words mentioned are probably 爱责仁德, pronounced “ài zé rén dé,” a fair approximation of the English.
(Rooting around about him, I see Project Gutenberg has five works by Linebarger, one of which is a novella written under his Cordwainer Smith pseudonym, three of which are works about China, and the fifth is Psychological Warfare, the book that established the field.)