On December 12, the South Korean media "Professor News" (교수신문) announced the media's selected 2021 annual idiom: "Cat and mouse together".
The so-called "cat and mouse are in the same place" is also known as "cat and mouse sleeping together", which is a classic of the "New Book of Tang , Five Elements Zhi · I", one of the twenty-four histories of ancient China, the original text is "In the first year of Long Shuo (661 AD, the reign of Emperor Gaozong of Tang) in November, the cat and mouse in Luozhou were together." Rats lurk like thieves, cats catch and eat, and instead work with rats, like thieves who abolish their duties and commit adultery." This idiom is often used as a metaphor for officials shielding subordinates from doing bad things, and even colluding from top to bottom.
Pictured from the Professor News website
Choi Jae-mu,최재목, a professor of philosophy at Lingnan University in South Korea who participated in the annual vocabulary selection activity, pointed out that there are problems and unfairness in the standards of legislation, judiciary, and administration in various parts of South Korea or between the government and the public, and officials who should be diligent in enforcing the law impartially and supervising and managing are actually tied to social interest groups, resulting in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches that should have been separated from the three powers to be like "cats and mice coexisting", resulting in the country being completely unrecognizable.
Another professor quoted the Chinese poem "Tanuki Nu Xing" (Tanuki Nu Xing) written by the Korean Thinker Ding Ruoyong of the Lee Dynasty: "Namsan Village Weng raises Tanuki Slaves, the old fox learns from the old foxes, the night and night grass hall steals meat, and the pot is overturned... Emperor Tiansheng Ru ben what to use, so that Ru catch rats to remove the people's scabies. The voles burrow and hide in the fields, and the house rats do not steal everything", accusing South Korean politicians of only knowing each other's opposition and not essentially distinguishing, and both the ruling party and the opposition party are more inclined to seek their own interests.
Some people even said that the reason for his choice of "cat and mouse together" came from the concern that next year's South Korean presidential election "seems to be relatively worse than anyone else".
Founded in 1991, Professor News is written by experts and scholars in the field of Korean humanities. Since 2001, the magazine has chosen an idiom as the "idiom of the year" every year, and the previous 5 years of annual idioms were "faint and unruly", "Junzhou Minshui", "Breaking evil and showing righteousness", "The road is long", "The bird of common destiny" and "I am he is not".
In this year's "Idioms of the Year" selection process, 880 university professors across South Korea selected a total of six idioms, while "Cat and Mouse Together" received 514 of the 1760 votes. In addition to this idiom, "people are sleepy and horses are lacking", "mud field fighting dog" (the korean peninsula's indigenous idiom, originally used to describe the residents from the northern Hamjeong Province), "carved boat for sword", "hundred feet pole head" and "widow into the well" are ranked 2 to 6.
Pictured from the Professor News website.
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