Reader question:

What does the phrase “best of both worlds” mean exactly?

My comments:

If means if you’re buying a pair of shoes, you can have them for the best quality at the lowest price.

Or something like that.

When people have the best of both worlds, they have two improbably things at the same time, two things that are seemingly contradictory to each other.

The ancient philosopher Mencius once said (I’m paraphrasing):

“Fish is what I want to have for dinner and bear’s feet also. But if I can’t have both, I would like to have bear’s feet for a change.

“Life is what I want to have and justice also. But if I can’t have both, I’d give up my life in order to sustain justice.”

Very well said, no?

Thing is, if someone said you can have both fish and bear’s feet for dinner today for lunch but you’d have to run 10 kilometers to fetch them, I bet you wouldn’t mind running to get them on bare foot.

That way, you’d be having the best of both worlds. That is, without making any compromise.

By the way, in Mencius’ time, more then two millenniums in the past, bears, though rare, were not an endangered animal as they are today. So therefore you perhaps can bear with contemporaries of Mencius targeting bears for food.

Anyways, here are media examples of “best of both worlds”:

1. Securing universal health care coverage for Americans was a decades-long quest that eluded Sen. Edward Kennedy. In the wake of his death, however, several key Democrats on Wednesday saw a chance to break what’s become this year’s stalemate by invoking his legacy and last wishes...

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who worked with Kennedy to expand children’s health coverage and who’s broken with his own party on stem-cell research issues, similarly recalled recently how he thought Kennedy would’ve handled the health care impasse.

“The first thing he would have done would have been to call me and say, ‘Let’s work this out, and we would work it out so that the best of both worlds would work,” Hatch said.

- In Kennedy’s death, some see hope on health care, McClatchy Newspapers via Yahoo.com, August 26, 2009.

2. Alice Springs, Australia - An ice rink isn't the first thing that springs to mind when you think of the sweltering, dusty heart of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, Australia, but more fool you, for that’s exactly what will be in the middle of the desert over Christmas.

Even though half of my family live in Australia, I’ve never quite got my head around the idea of a hot Christmas.

No amount of white sandy beaches can compete with that glorious anticipation of a sparkly dusting of snow on Christmas morning.

(Let’s gloss over the fact that the last time we had a white Christmas I was as old as my shoe size).

But, this coming Christmas, Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, will have the best of both worlds - the hot temperatures and the winter wonderland.

Whilst the mercury will be topping a baking 40 degrees in one of the hottest towns in Australia, local residents and tourists will be enjoying gliding over the ice slap bang in the middle of the desert a surreal experience if ever there was one.

- EmailWire.com, August 30, 2009.

3. When the Tribune Company announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, last Monday, Sam Zell, the man who bought the company a year ago, for $8.2 billion, said that its problems were the result of a “perfect storm.” You take readers and advertisers who were already migrating away from print, and add a steep recession, and you’ve got serious trouble. What Zell failed to mention was that his acquisition of the company had buried it beneath such a heavy pile of debt that any storm at all would likely have sunk it. But although Zell was making excuses for his own mismanagement, the perfect storm is real enough, and it is threatening to destroy newspapers as we know them. Layoffs and buyouts have become routine. The Miami Herald and the San Diego Union-Tribune are reportedly on the selling block, while lawmakers in Connecticut are trying to keep two newspapers there afloat. Even the New York Times Company has slashed its dividend and announced that it would borrow against its headquarters to avoid cash-flow problems…

Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work. But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

- New You Can Lose, The New Yorker, December 22, 2008.

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

我要看更多專欄文章

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

相關閱讀：

Run its course?

David doesn’t do failure

Aha moment