But are we getting a Tucker, a Church, or a Caboose?

起死回生
ki.shi.kai.sei

Literally: wake up – death – revolve – life

Alternately: Coming back from the brink. Recovering from a seemingly-hopeless situation. A sudden turnaround. A Blue Team win deep in Red Team territory.

Notes: Apparently this phrase comes to us from the Taiping Guangji (太平広記, in Japanese Taihei kouki), a story collection from the early Song dynasty, where it was originally used to describe a doctor so skilled that they could bring the dead back to life.

回 may be replaced by 廻 without any change in pronunciation or meaning; the halves of the compound may also be reversed to produce 回生起死.

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
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