So don’t misunderstand, if your Chinese friend tries to warn you: “She is a miss,” he or she actually means she is a bad girl. The dark meaning of “miss” is a woman who works as a prostitute. Generally speaking, if you call a lady “Miss” together with her surname, that’s no problem, but if you call a female stranger “miss”, you might very well offend her.
What? Calling a young lady “miss” is wrong? Yes, you need to watch out for this. This doesn’t only refer to a husband and wife situation – any man who gets financial support from a woman will be called “a man who eats soft rice”. It’s traditional, in practically every culture, that a man should be the breadwinner for the family, so if the wife becomes the breadwinner, her husband will be called “a man who eats soft rice.” Of course, that’s a big insult, both for the husband and the wife. No one likes to eat rice that’s hard because it’s not cooked enough, but if you are a man you cannot say: “I like eating soft rice,” because eating soft rice has a dark meaning: it means a man who is supported financially by a woman (other than his own mother). It’s best to stay away from those green hats! Later, it became common to say about man whose wife had an affair, that she made her husband wear a green hat. Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang enacted a law, which required men who worked in the prostitution trade to wear green hats. The source is a story from the Ming Dynasty. And, be sure you don’t wear one yourself, either. Let it be a warning to you: no matter how curious you are, you’d better not ask them why they don’t wear a green hat! The reason is, in Chinese culture, wearing green hat has a dark meaning: the one wearing it was cuckolded. If you are traveling in China, you might notice a curious thing – you will never find a Chinese man wearing a green hat. Some of them have existed for a long time, so you can find their hidden meanings in a dictionary, but some, although well known among Chinese people, are not mentioned in any dictionary… Lets take a look! The following Chinese terms all have dark meanings. If people who are not aware of the hidden meanings use these words incorrectly, they may insult themselves, or even other people, unknowingly. Surely in every country, and every culture, there are some very commonly used words – common according to their literal meanings – which also have dark meanings that are tacitly understood among native speakers. This article is written by one of the language teachers at italki Image by martinak15 ( CC by 2.0)