Lexical Leavings
by Tom Gally
Today,
in an English-Japanese dictionary, I came across another ghost
proverb--a proverb that appears in English-language educational
references in Japan but is rarely if ever used in English: Every man has his humo(u)r, which several
dictionaries translate as 十人十色. A Web search for the sentence gets
mostly hits from language-education sites in Japan and China, suggesting that
it is a proverb that exists mainly as an example of a proverb, not
something that English speakers actually say or write. Many such ghosts
haunt bilingual dictionaries.(December 21, 2002)