Uncertainty in Interesting Times: We Live in an Interesting Age mauritiustimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mauritiustimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
May you live in interesting times.
If 2020 had been a Hollywood movie, that would have been the perfect tagline. And the sequel, now underway, could be titled “2021: Extraordinary Times.”
Widely and wrongly believed to be an ancient Chinese curse, the statement “May you live in interesting times” was apparently coined less than a century ago, according to scholars and historians, both Eastern and Western. In 1939, the year World War II began, American attorney Frederic R. Coudert made the first recorded mention of the phase. Speaking at the Academy of Political Science in New York, Coudert quoted from a letter he’d received from British statesman Sir Austen Chamberlain: