We must not exaggerate what is said_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

We must not exaggerate what is said

Nothing could be more natural. Organizers of the Beijing Games invited hundreds of famous artists to bid for it. They whittled the list down to five.

The Chinese language can be beautifully or agonizingly ambiguous, depending on your position. I remember in the early days private enterprises might say they "earned a million bucks" without specifying whether it's revenue or profit. Vagueness prevents one from losing face if you don't want to draw attention to the embarrassment of losing money. It also enhances your "face" when you want to use positive feedback about one tree to cover the whole forest.

Chinese media have a tradition of amplifying good words from outsiders. A Chinese performance in a foreign country is often reported to be "exceptional". Gradually, people at home get the impression that people in that country have never experienced good performing arts.

You might think that with the Internet and so many people learning English it'll be harder for this kind of misunderstanding to occur. On the contrary, things have not got much better. It's just the power of interpreting foreign commentaries have shifted from the few in the traditional media to a few in online media. Those in the traditional media may be politically motivated to focus on the details that suit them, and those in the online media may simply lack the language proficiency to render correctly the original observation, or they may even have personal agendas to be selective.