not to be worth a hair

not to be worth a hair

Chinese idiom, Pinyin is y ī w é Nb ù zh í, which means that there is no value at all, and then it means that people are useless. It comes from "three repays for kindness, scolding sycophants".

Idiom usage

As predicate, attributive, adverbial, also as worthless. Sometimes I say that my composition is all about sympathy, sometimes I scold the right person. Lu Xun's collection of books

The origin of Idioms

Bi Wei's "three repays for kindness and scolding for sycophants" in Ming Dynasty: "it's the most pathetic that the name of the young scholar is worthless."

Idioms and allusions

In the Ming Dynasty, some scholars in Shantang street of Suzhou often gathered in a bird walking garden. One day, there was a picture of a hundred birds painted by Shen Zhou on the wall. Next to it was marked the price. It was a riddle: a hanging of money (in the old days, a hanging was 100 Wen) and a earthen jar. There are ninety-nine articles in the pot, but one article is put on the top of the pot, claiming that Shen Zhou's paintings will be given to anyone who can guess the total amount, and none will be accepted. This move has attracted a lot of pedestrians. It turns out that Shen Zhou, the Wu School of painting, is very famous. After hearing about it, a rich man in Hangzhou went to Suzhou several times to hire him with a lot of money and asked him to paint for him. However, Shen Zhou knew that he was a local tyrant and was treacherous, so he declined politely. Later, the resentful rich man came up with an idea to ask a family member to pretend to be a poor man. He claimed that his mother was seriously ill and had no money to cure him. He begged Shen Zhou to give him a painting and sell it at a high price to cure his mother. Shen Zhou was kind-hearted and believed it to be true, so he drew a picture of a hundred birds and gave it to the poor. Shen Zhou was so angry that he ran to the bird walk garden and said, "don't you mark the price as" not worth a cent? "? Since it's worthless (Wu dialect's pronunciation is "value" and "entry"), then the painting belongs to me. " And reached out to uncover the picture. The "poor man" was speechless and quickly stopped and returned to the rich man. As soon as the rich man heard this, he was flustered. Selling the painting was fake and insulting Shen was true. He ran to say, "Mr. Shen calms down, but my younger brother has no choice but to use the painting for a narration.". Shen Zhou thought more and more, went to the garden, took out a handful of white rice from his arms and threw it into the air. In an instant, a hundred birds in the picture fly down to peck rice. When the urchins saw that there were so many beautiful birds to catch, they were so surprised that a hundred birds flew around. Shen Zhou just left. people on the scene, looking at the distant birds and Shen Zhou's back, exclaimed: "divine bird", "painting Fairy"! At this time, the rich man thought of something and looked back at the picture of birds on the wall. He was so surprised that there were no birds on the white paper. The idiom "worthless" comes from this story.