Ivanka Trump took to Twitter to express support for her father, Donald Trump, prior to his meeting with DPRK leader Kim Jong-un; however, her choice of wording left many perplexed.
Ms Trump, whose daughter is learning Mandarin, attributed the quote to "Chinese Proverb" along with her post on Twitter, published hours before her father came together with Mr Kim to seek an end to a tense decades-old nuclear stand-off. A pseudo-Confucian version was fabricated in 1962 - perhaps explaining why Ms Trump believed it was a Chinese proverb.
The blog Quote Investigator has found that the saying first emerged in a 1903 Chicago magazine in reference to innovation during that time.
Internet users are saying Ivanka Trump would be wise to double check online quotes after she shared an apparently fake "Chinese proverb".
People on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo attempted to come up with a list of real Chinese proverbs that might match what Trump was trying to say.
President Donald Trump met with North Korean leader Kim on Tuesday in a luxury hotel on a resort island in Singapore, in a summit unimaginable just months ago.
Immediately, thousands of users began to offer their suggestions as to what proverb the tweet might have been an attempt at quoting, but no one could verify its authenticity. Actually, the saying has been occasionally ascribed to the famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, though there's no evidence of him ever having used it.
"[My editor] really can't think of what exactly this proverb is".
In China, where Twitter is blocked, screenshots of Ivanka's saying circulated on the social media site Weibo. "Please help!", read a post by news channel Sina, which is Weibo's parent company, as per news agency AFP.
She hired a Chinese-speaking nanny to tutor her daughter.
Bill Kristol, editor of the USA political magazine the Weekly Standard, tweeted a guess that the phrase "seems in fact to be American from the turn of the 20th c. - which makes sense, since its spirit is can-do Americanism". "But why are Trump WH aides giving our proverbs to China, increasing our proverb deficit?"
13 June 2018
