In our global village, more and more attention has been given to cross-culture communication. More and more people realize that learning a foreign culture is as important as, if not more important than, learning a language.
In Chinese culture, many words/expressions, neural in literal meaning, may become offensive or highly desirable simply because they are associated with taboo or good luck for purely linguistic reasons. My friend's experience may serve as an illustration of this phenomenon.
The American chief executive manager in her company prepared a gift package for each of the exployees before the Chinese New Year Festival. The package included an electronic clock and this particular gift item created uproar among the Chinese exployees, because the phrase used to describe the behavior of giving a clock 送钟 sounds exactly the same as 送终, meaning 'give a funeral', which is, of course, something avoided (namely taboo) whatever culture you look at. To correct the mistake or reverse the taboo, the American manager had to, following the suggestion of a Chinese employee, throw in a history book to complete the gift package, because the Chinese word for 'history' sounds the same as 'beginning' and the Chinese word for 'clock' is also a homophone of 'end', thus the package has beginning and end corrsponding to the Chinese idiomatic expression 有始有终 'having a beginning and an end', which is used to commend people who can accomplish a task from the beginning to the end.
(More stories to come)