Writing Off with One Stroke of the Pen

Characters:

Pronunciation: yi(4) bi(3) gou(1) xiao(1)

Explanation: Meaning to cancel everything.

The Story: Fan Zhongyan, the famous statesman and writer of the Song Dynasty, once served as a Vice Prime Minister.

One day, when he was reading through a roll of officials, he took up his pen and mercilessly struck out with one stroke all the names of prefecture supervisors who were incompetent. Fu Bi, his assistant, said to him: "You can strike out their names with one stroke of pen, but don't you know that the whole family of the dismissed official will weep bitterly?" Fan Zhongyan answered quickly: "Let a whole family cry if they want to, so that the people of a whole prefecture will not cry." He thus dismissed all the incompetent supervisors.

Usage Example (Pinyin): Rang(4) wo(3) men(2) ba(3) yi(3) qian(2) de en(1) yuan(4) yi(1) bi(3) gou(1) xiao(1), cong(2) xian(4) zai(4) qi(3) chong(2) xin(1) zuo(4) peng(2) you(3).

Usage Example (English translation): Let's write off with one stroke of the pen all our conflicts from before and begin a new friendship!

Note: The spoken Chinese Mandarin language has 4 spoken tones. We have attempted to re-create those above where after each syllable we tell you (1), (2), (3), or (4) as they correspond to each of the 4 tones. We encourage you to complement your Xianzai.com Chinese Idioms newsletter with a good offline study program.