From DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_l@21:1/5 to All on Sun Feb 27 19:49:46 2022
Another example is kuàizhìrénkǒu 膾炙人口 ("be much relished; enjoy great popularity; appealing to the masses; universally appreciated; liked by many; on everyone's lips" [idiom]) that we talked about a few days ago. Yes, kuàizhì 膾炙 (n. "
thinly sliced meat and roasted meat"; v. "to be appreciated and praised") first appeared in Mencius (372-289 BC). Yet kuàizhìrénkǒu 膾炙人口 was not applied in the literary realm — the context in which the idiom is still used today — until
the Late Tang Dynasty under the influence of Buddhism and the Indian aesthetic concept of rasa (taste). I just want to make this point because the Chinese are so so so fixated in skimming through hundreds or even thousands of pages of sources for the “
etymology” or “root” of a word / expression, without understanding what this word really means and what its context really wants to say about the society that produces it.