I wish people would learn what the hundred flowers campaign was and not use such dumb and insensitive titles for their blog posts. It's like calling it "the final solution to the twitter problem".
Nobody much considers "let a hundrend flowers bloom" (as a phrase) equivalent to the "final solution", not even in China. This includes people who know all about Mao, the cultural revolution, the power plays and the executions that happened at the time.
It's actually a stock phrase in journalism and writing in general in lots of European countries (I know that's the case of its use in at least 4 countries/languages).
This looks more like someone in the US, several times removed from the events (by ethnicity, nation, time, etc), delivering a paternalistic lecture on foreign history.
Examples of casual use in both US and UK:
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21581984-inner-city-sc...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/11/03/we...
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/16/national-ant...
But in any case, "Let a thousand flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them out" is much more evocative of those events than the casual uses you cite.
It's reasonable to infer offense from that statement.
That's correct, and I wouldn't mind if it was just that.
But OP's "I wish people would stop" etc and calling it "dumb and insensitive titles" goes a few steps beyond "pointing out that this phrase might carry extra meaning".
Likewise, I think it's disingenuous for readers to begin their indignation at every corner they find someone who is ignorant of the baggage a phrase or word might have with other people. I sometimes wonder if these kinds of oversensitive people don't go about putting a list together of all the inventions and things furthered by disgraced people because partaking in such things would give such detestable things their imprimatur.
So and so was a philanderer, this other one was an opportunist, that one was a bigot, this one was sexist, that one a hedonist, an atheist, a Christian, short, stinky, tall, too cultured, not my type, too much my type...
I don't take offence, but may suffer injuries related to involuntary eye rolling. It's an overused phrase and I'll assume the author is a hack and stop reading. Sort of like anything with "cyber" in the title published after 1993.
Hopefully this blog post's author was unaware of the hundred flowers campaign. In any case it's very helpful of you to point this out so this meme doesn't get passed along by those of us ignorant of this bit of history.
Now you aren't wrong. But I also don't think it's fair to call dumb and insensitive. It's not dumb because it's a perfectly reasonable and useful analogy. And I don't think it's fair to call it insensitive because the author almost certainly didn't know the 60 year old foreign history from which it is derived. That's not someone being callous or insensitive.
It's just good old fashioned ignorance. But ignorance that's kind of ok and fine. Like, it's just totally ok for someone not to know the origin of the phrase.
"Let a thousand flowers bloom" has an entirely clear and positive meaning for the vast majority of English speakers.
I wouldn't use it as part of any argument as it will likely lead you to miss important details and cannot lead you to valid conclusions.
It doesn't really make sense to me that a regular phrase like 'final solution', which has been used as a rather awkward translation of 'endlösung', would have gotten the same connotation as the word itself. I must have said "so we end up with a final solution of ..." countless times and I've never noticed a thing.
Language is basically a crappy form of telepathy. You're essentially implanting thoughts in other people's minds. It's crappy because it's really imprecise and error-prone and the minds you're attempting to influence might end up thinking things other than what you're trying to make them think, often because the specific words or phrasing you used brought up associations existing within the target mind.
Sometimes it's impossible to avoid because the association is a personal thing. But sometimes it's widespread. In that case, it's really useful to be aware of them.
I've certainly made my share of bad phrasing in languages I don't speak natively. No reasonable person is going to be offended if you did it because of ignorance, but once pointed out, it's ridiculous to get defensive. Make a note of it and use this knowledge to improve.
Oh yes, someone is callous unless she learns the sensitivities of every person and group in the world, and then avoids them all whenever posting anything on the web.
Or, you know, we could just be more forgiving and understanding of each other.
It's an blog post dude, not an insensitive advertising slogan for a new foreign market, get over yourself. Assume he didn't know any better and move on.
Being upset about using this phrase is like an army of tumblr SJWs being annoyed when someone says gypped. Not everybody knows the complete cultural and racial history of every innocent common phrase used today, even if they come from questionable historical pasts.
Here's what I see: jordigh says he wishes people would learn about the hundred flowers campaign so they won't make such bad allusions by accident. coldtea counters this saying that it's not actually bad. seiji agrees with coldtea and attempts to offer further support by saying that people don't learn about this stuff anyway.
Not so?
Ain't that hard.
Having thought about it, it doesn't really make sense, since I'd apologize for hitting someone even if I didn't mean to, and even if I couldn't be reasonably expected to hit them.
But when the issue is offense, you don't want to apologize, because you think that they think that you meant to cause offense, and apologizing will reinforce in their mind the idea that you really did mean to do it, or at least in your mind it will reinforce that idea in their mind. And you don't want to reinforce that idea in their mind, partly because it makes you look bad, and partly because the idea is simply wrong. So you don't want to apologize.
(Note well: "you" here means "me, too, given the right circumstances".)
Worse: That may really be going on in the other person's mind. They may really think (or at least suspect) that you meant to cause offense, and therefore are determined that you must apologize as penance or proof of repentance or some such. "The good of society demands that I force this person to apologize!"
So maybe the best answer is to say something like: "I did not intend or wish to give offense. Apparently I did; I apologize for doing so." Because the fact is, the offense was real. Apologizing for it is just good manners. But apologize without agreeing that you had intent.
This presumes that you didn't have intent. If you intended to offend, that's a whole different situation. It's worthy of an apology, not just for the offense, but for the intent.
I haven't seen any "you're an asshole" type comments in here--more "aw, c'mon, man." (I frown more at whatever instructors the author had in 20th century history a lot more than the author himself. This is something that's not that obscure, but you gotta know it exists to know about it.)
If memory of my history class serves, the quote of letting flowers bloom comes from Mao, who told people he wanted them to open up and share their political differences (ostensibly so that some kind of political dialog could follow), but with the ulterior motive of merely outing his political enemies in order to do terrible things to them.
It's a shame to be discussing this instead of the article, though, since I am a huge Peter Seibel fan!