Thank You, 2014 – For Teaching Me 14 Essential Life Tips
(I’m not really sorry for the
overused clichéd title. It’s what this post is about and my creative juices are
finally recovering from the
two-year-long writer’s block that had hit me)
The number fourteen has no particular significance in most cultures, except the Chinese one.
According to the Chinese, any number with four at the end is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of the Chinese word for the word ‘four’ is eerily similar to the word they use for ‘death’.
That’s why, instead of naming all the floors in a building like most people normally do, the Chinese insist on not naming the fourth/fourteenth/twenty-fourth or any other floor with the last digit ‘four’ with their respective names. Instead, they chose to name the floor after the next digit.
I know the paragraph written above is highly confusing. So the conclusion is: the number ‘four’ is like the number ‘thirteen’ of the western culture.
I’d known about this titbit since I was eleven (all thanks to a book on Chinese hi…
The number fourteen has no particular significance in most cultures, except the Chinese one.
According to the Chinese, any number with four at the end is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of the Chinese word for the word ‘four’ is eerily similar to the word they use for ‘death’.
That’s why, instead of naming all the floors in a building like most people normally do, the Chinese insist on not naming the fourth/fourteenth/twenty-fourth or any other floor with the last digit ‘four’ with their respective names. Instead, they chose to name the floor after the next digit.
I know the paragraph written above is highly confusing. So the conclusion is: the number ‘four’ is like the number ‘thirteen’ of the western culture.
I’d known about this titbit since I was eleven (all thanks to a book on Chinese hi…