When I wrote trivia for a living....

I look it up and get:

This can be chalked up as another urban myth. It is possible to make such and ideogram but it has no meaning in Chinese, certainly not trouble.

http://www.friesian.com/yinyang.htm

The link includes this note:

 It is sometimes said that the Chinese character for "trouble" shows two women under one roof. Such a character is possible, and would look like this , but there actually is no such Chinese character, though I understand that the myth lives on the internet.

While a Chinese culture site has this:

trouble:

Chinese Pinyin: ma2 fan2

The two characters under the 'roof' of the first part look like the symbol for Rice, to me, and stands for tingling sensation such as pins and needles. It's also the first symbol in the two-symbol word Mahjong, the game.

Though an old English rhyme on this theme has it:

Two wymen in one howse,

Two cattes and one mowce,

Two dogges and one bone,

Maye never accorde in one.

I also found lots of trivia sites echoing the 'two women' claim.

What a fun way to waste time instead of getting started on my work for today!

I once worked in LA for a producer who was creating a couple of TV commercial series, for one of which I was the copy writer. This was back in the days of the "Bicentennial Minutes" if you remember them: These were trivia tidbits about American history in the year of the bicentennial, 1976; the one-minute commercial had thirty seconds during which a 'personality' announcer would tell you some interesting factual tidbit, and the next 28 seconds would be sold to local advertisers as sponsors, concluding with "And this has been a Bicentennial Minute!"

Well, this was around 1979 and this guy created two similar series, one called "It's A Fact!" and another, makeup advice tips, was "Tips from Toni!" I created the bits by finding trivia books, pulling out the more interesting bits, then researching to see if they were actually true. The majority were sourceless and unsourceable -- and apparently made up. A few were checkable, and often wrong or misinterpreted; many, such as the ones about odd laws around the US, were often mysterious only because unexplained.

This left a handful of interesting ones, some of which were even more interesting when you looked them up. Such as: An ostrich is capable of kicking a man off a horse (they're tall enough, and their legs amazingly strong). In the desert of Southwest Africa, diamond miners in the early 1900s would sometimes kill ostriches for their diamonds--turns out the gizzards of mature birds could have a handful of diamonds in them, because birds swallow stones from the ground so that their gizzards can use them to help grind up food The stones disintegrate over time, so they eat more -- but diamonds don't grind down and so remain behind.

I figured out, based on my reading speed, that the scripts had to be 110 words long. I wrote 120 of them over the course of a month or so. Then we went to a studio where the 'talent,' an over-the-hill announcer, read the bits--only to find that at his reading speed, the scripts had to be 96 words long.

So I had to go back and in a few days trim each of 120 scripts by exactly 14 words.

I learned a lot about editing for length....

Anyway, to circle back to my point, whereever I left it -- most trivia is untrue, in my research-based experience -- untrue, made up, misinterpreted, missing key elements or context that would make them less amazing, or otherwise unreliable. How very much I appreciate Snopes.com!

mac