everyone should take time to be alone.

The first time Sally Brown hears about school.

"Sally Brown's brother, Charlie Brown, was so pleased and proud when she was born that he passed out chocolate cigars. Since then he's been trying to understand her. She always looks for the easy way out, particularly at school, where her view of life reflects much of the frustration and confusion kids experience. Her speech is riddled with malapropisms. Uninhibited, and precocious, she has a schoolgirl crush on Linus, her "Sweet Babboo." She may never win Linus' heart, but she has her big brother wrapped around her little finger. Sally, writing letters or doing homework, causes pain and joy to her fans in roughly equal proportions."

"I've looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions i recall.
I really don't know life at all."

when i sat on the rock near the sea, i  kept my boiling silence.

Song: These Days

I've been out walking
I don't do too much talking
These days, these days.
These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do
And all the times I had the chance to.

I've stopped my rambling,
I don't do too much gambling
These days, these days.
These days I seem to think about
How all the changes came about my ways
And I wonder if I'll see another highway.

I had a lover,
I don't think I'll risk another
These days, these days.
And if I seem to be afraid
To live the life that I have made in song
It's just that I've been losing so long.
La la la la la, la la.

I've stopped my dreaming,
I won't do too much scheming
These days, these days.
These days I sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten.
Please don't confront me with my failures,
I had not forgotten them.

HA

A street slogan in a northeastern city has sparked a debate, proving that public mentality is so entrenched on linguistic matters that even a little toying is met with a wall of frowns.

The slogan that recently appeared in Shenyang of Liaoning Province is intended to discourage unlicensed drivers. Under normal circumstances, one might see a call such as "Severely punish unlicensed driving," or some variation of it.

The poster in question borrowed a line from the popular movie "A World Without Thieves" and twisted it into, "I detest unlicensed driving because it does not have any technical difficulty in it."

Some people just don't have a sense of humour. They have dissected the "technical difficulty" part without understanding that the catchphrase has a life of its own ever since the movie premiered more than a year ago.

That's the biggest strength of Feng Xiao-gang's films, which are always able to create simple but memorable lines that eventually work into everyday conversations.

But for the most part, we live in a world of clichs.

If you read a Chinese newspaper, there are word combinations that are more inseparable than conjoined twins. Look no further than "warmly welcome" or "actively participate."

Is there such a thing as a lukewarm welcome? If there is, it doesn't seem to exist in China. From what I've experienced, "warmly welcome" usually refers to a reception that is ceremonious and utterly lacking in spontaneity or warmth. It would be more accurate to use "routinely welcome" instead.

"Study hard" is the literal translation of another Chinese banality that has dogged us for decades. How hard counts as "hard"? Reading 400 pages a day? In the ancient times, we had expressive descriptions such as the one for the student who hanged his hair around a girder so he wouldn't doze off while poring over Confucius. That is how vivacious the Chinese language used to be.

When words are used indiscriminately or simply overused, they lose their vitality. I remember in the 1970s every store in China had a maxim of top-10 things to adhere to and it always included, "Be nice to customers." But in that age of scarcity, sales people wore a customary look of disdain on their faces. There was not even a hint of contrast or black humour. The to-do words on the poster had been sapped of their dictionary-sanctioned meanings.

Nothing dulls a language faster than an overload of platitudes. There are many culprits: Bureaucrats who stick to a small set of officialese and hammer it into public sub-consciousness, business executives who pick up fancy terms from MBA programmes and couch a plain "You're fired" in resource management jargon, and scholars who insist on rejecting new coinages because they were created by teenagers.

The same is true everywhere. I once was enamoured with US presidential speeches. Penned by writers like Peggy Noonon, they seemed to be fresh and devoid of triteness.

Then I noticed the words "hero" and "coward." American politicians have a penchant to call victims "heroes." If you are caught by the enemy and beaten up, you are hailed as a "hero," and if you blow up a building and kill yourself and 1,000 innocent people, you are a "coward."

I wonder who first used "coward" in this context. Is it because your enemy would call him a "hero" so you'd have to use the antonym? A "suicide killer" might be a "merciless desperado" but he is definitely not weak or faint-hearted, which are synonymous with cowardly.I believe the first user of "hero" or "coward" in this sense was a genius. He bent the dictionary definition and achieved rhetorical effect. Then the US presidents imitated him, creating a semantic paradox.

The writer of the Shenyang poster instinctively knew that "severely punish" would be as good as invisible. So, he opted for an "it" phrase. If anything, he was not innovative enough. He should have invented his own axiom, and then he'll become a linguistic hero.

（《China Daily》,Raymond Zhou）