扑朔迷离
- Literal
- kicking feet, half-closed eyes
- Figurative
- So tangled and murky that it is hard to see clearly or tell what is true; said mostly of cases, plots and situations.
Where does 扑朔迷离 come from?
It comes from the closing lines of the 《木兰辞》, the folk ballad of the Northern dynasties about Mulan, who went to war in her father's place dressed as a man and served twelve years without her comrades learning she was a woman. It ends on an image in Mulan's own voice: the male rabbit's feet kick and the female's eyes half close, but when the two run side by side close to the ground, who could tell whether I am male or female? As with the rabbits, no one saw she was a woman. From those telltale signs that tell nothing came the idiom, now used for anything where there is no way to see clearly.
Source (出处): 《木兰辞》
How is 扑朔迷离 used? Two examples
- 这部悬疑剧的剧情扑朔迷离，看到最后我才猜出凶手。
The plot of this mystery series is so murky that I didn't figure out who the killer was until the very end.
- 关于两家公司合并的消息扑朔迷离，股价也跟着忽高忽低。
Reports about the merger of the two companies are so murky that the share price keeps swinging up and down.
In Wanyu, all 400 chengyu have audio on every sentence, and you can save them to your decks and review them with spaced repetition. Free.
