Double Cao
« previous post | next post »
On first blush, I thought perhaps the person pictured had a double chin, and by cropping the photo this way they were trying to hide it. On second blush, it was clear that they had misinterpreted the name of the famous 2nd c. statesman, general, and poet, Cao Cao 曹操 (ca. 155-220 AD).
The line of verse on the T-shirt is the first from Cao Cao's famous 16-line poem, "Duǎngē xíng《短歌行》" ("Short Song Ballad"), written in the year 207 AD:
duì jiǔ dāng gē, rénshēng jǐhé?
對酒當歌，人生幾何？
"Facing the brew, let us sing; how long does one's life last?"
For the complete poem in Chinese and English, see this Wikipedia article.
Selected readings
- "Preserved wife plum" (7/12/17)
- "Plum > apricot and wine > brew: the language of poetry and painting" (7/14/17
- "Two brews" (26/10)
- "Brew" (11/25/21)
- "Let the Beer-Divider Be Chief!" (9/5/09)
- "English 'wine', French 'vin', Spanish 'vino'" (8/6/16)
[Thanks to Diana Shuheng Zhang]
wgj said,
July 30, 2025 @ 12:30 am
I believe this is intentional misinterpretation/mistranslation in order to be funny – what the kids call "being ironical".
languagehat said,
July 30, 2025 @ 8:26 am
Yes, it's just a joke (although it would be more effective if the "cao" were appropriately capitalized).
rpsms said,
July 30, 2025 @ 12:02 pm
Reminds me of Principia Discordia:
A priest with his students confronted The Sacred Chao while she was grazing and asked it a question to which The Sacred Chao replied "MU". But nobody was enlightened. Primarily because nobody could understand Chinese.
Victor Mair said,
July 30, 2025 @ 12:13 pm
One place they write "Double Cao" and one place "Double cao".
Dave J. said,
July 30, 2025 @ 9:24 pm
Holy cao!
wgj said,
July 31, 2025 @ 12:14 am
It's really a missed opportunity that they didn't translate the last sentence as "Life is geometry."
Jonathan Smith said,
July 31, 2025 @ 1:25 am
Tangentially to this and the earlier thread about translation of Western scientific terminology in Japan/China, apparently 幾何 just meant math (naturally enough given the Classical Chinese) in things like Giulio Aleni’s 西學凡 (1623). IDK when/how the change to geometry in particular — Japan it is said. The key passages are written all kinds of ways on the internets (can't seem to find a page image) but a choice Xixuefan quote is given as "幾何之學，名曰瑪得瑪弟加，譯言察幾何之道" in the study 艾儒略與相關學科用語的創制及傳播——通過比較《西學》與《西學凡》by 王彩芹.
Re the joke poem why not "person gives birth to geometry"…
wgj said,
July 31, 2025 @ 2:20 am
Oh yeah! "Gives birth to geometry" is obviously a better joke.
The term 幾何 to mean geometry originates from the book 幾何原本, which was the (first) Chinese translation of Euclid's Stoikheïa AKA The Elements. The translation (from a Latin version) was done in 1607 by the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci and his Chinese friend / student / convert to Catholicism Xu Guangqi, and they chose 幾何 for the (Euclidean) concept of geometry because it has both semantic and phonetic associations – 幾何 was pronounce something like gi-ho, which resembles "geo" (in Latin).
Jonathan Smith said,
July 31, 2025 @ 3:37 pm
@wgj I don't think so at least in the body of 幾何原本 — an article I saw recently on this was Masahiro OGAWA, "Xu Guangqi and the Chinese translation of Euclid's Elements." E.g. beginning of 幾何原本 reads 凡曆法地理樂律算章技藝工巧諸事有度有數者皆依賴十府中幾何府屬 i.e. 幾何 in this tradition meant "not only the learning of figures (geometry) but in fact […] mathematical studies in general" (Ogawa p. 24). FWIW they also dismiss the "geo" theory and argue that the shift to 'geometry' proper was because 幾何原本 in its early forms just translated the planar geometry portions of Euclid.
Tom said,
July 31, 2025 @ 6:08 pm
If it's a joke, I don't get it. Is it a linguistics joke I don't get because I'm not educated in that field? To me, it looks like an honest but inept attempt at a translation in the vein of so many similar ones I see across Asia.
wgj said,
August 1, 2025 @ 3:00 am
@Tom: At least the "double" construct is clearly a joke because neither Chinese nor English had a custom to refer to "something something" as "double something", unless the something is a number (double-10 for 10 October) or a letter (W-triple-C for WWWC), or if "something something" actually refer to two (separate and parallel) instances of something. If you have a friend named John Johnson, and you call him "Double Johnson", it will understood as a joke, too.
Jerry Packard said,
August 1, 2025 @ 6:48 am
Double Cao is just a clever way to refer to 曹操 CaoCao, whose name appears in one of the most common Chinese sayings: “说曹操，曹操到 (shuō Cáo Cāo, Cáo Cāo dào) speak of the devil and he appears”
Victor Mair said,
August 1, 2025 @ 8:27 am
It's not "just a joke". There's something much more profound and ironic going on here. Faced with the difficulty of translating classical Chinese poetry into good English, the person(s) who created this T-shirt are making a wry statement about their dilemma.
I see this sort of thing every day among my smart, nice graduate students from China.
Tom said,
August 1, 2025 @ 10:21 am
@wjg
Okay. Taken into consideration.
@Victor Mair
Okay, but are the makers of this t-shirt at the same level of bilingualism as your students?
It just seems to me that the -t-shirt could be explained by ignorance rather than irony.
Jerry Packard said,
August 1, 2025 @ 11:09 am
@Tom
The behavior is hardly explained by ignorance. The shirtmakers understand it fully, and express it eloquently and succinctly, even down to the literal translation that they nonetheless succeed in rhyming. They also avoid the temptation of playing with the crass low-hanging fruit of the homophonous uber obscene word.
Victor Mair said,
August 1, 2025 @ 11:12 am
@Tom
This t-shirt looks like a sophisticated, fairly costly production, and –judging from the high intelligence and overall great savvy of the person who sen it to me — its makers are at a level of bilingualism comparable to many of my own students.
Victor Mair said,
August 1, 2025 @ 11:15 am
I'm glad that Jerry Packard pointed out the rhyme. I was thinking about — and appreciating — that too.
Philip Taylor said,
August 2, 2025 @ 6:05 am
WJG — neither Chinese nor English had a custom to refer to "something something" as "double something", unless the something is a number (double-10 for 10 October) or a letter (W-triple-C for WWWC) — the first would, I think, never be used in British English, and the latter appears odd to me — did you mean "Triple-W C", perhaps ? As to the use for numbers, British practice when speaking telephone numbers would be to use (e.g.,)" "double-two" if the number in question contains a bare "22", and "two double-two" if it contains three consecutive two·s, but never "triple two" and never "double-two two". "Double-two, double-two" would, however, be correct for four consecutive two·s.
wgj said,
August 2, 2025 @ 11:32 am
WWWC is the abbreviation of World Wide Web Consortium, who among others sets the HTML standard. But because they're computer geeks, they chose to play around and shorten WWWC to W³C, or W3C when using ASCII-7 that doesn't contain the cube sign. Now the question is, how do you pronounce it? I've never heard W-cube-C, I've heard W-three-C but only by "outsiders" who aren't familiar with underlying tech of the internet, I've heard triple-W-C (which would be correct, as you've pointed out) but only rarely, and what I hear most is W-triple-C, simply because that's the order suggested by W3C. So this is really a special case – probably not a good choice for an example.
10 October (1911) was the date of the Wuchang Uprising which started the Xinhai Revolution, and it became the founding date of the Republic of China. It's referred to as double-ten in Chinese.
Philip Taylor said,
August 3, 2025 @ 10:14 am
Well, I was for some time a "W3C invited expert" (until all such experts were required to agree to submit to the jurisdiction of some American legal entity, at which point I resigned), so I think I may reasonably claim not to be an "outsider", yet for me it always was, is, and will be, the "W Three C". I have never encountered the "W-triple-C" which, were I to encounter it, would suggest the WCCC, not the WWWC.
unekdoud said,
August 4, 2025 @ 6:20 am
While there is indeed a difficulty in translating Classical Chinese, I believe the use of 2Cao's rapper name here also makes a point that the underlying message can often be mundane.