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Tiếng Việt

Once in a blue moon

Very rarely; almost never.

Năm thì mười họa.

Rất hiếm khi xảy ra.

Once in a blue moon

Examples

  • He visits his hometown once in a blue moon.

    Năm thì mười họa anh ấy mới về quê.

  • We only eat out once in a blue moon these days.

    Dạo này năm thì mười họa chúng tôi mới đi ăn ngoài.

In Popular Culture

  • Speech

    You know, one of the greatest things about being Governor of my State is I got to hear her sing about once a month instead of once in a blue moon.

    Các bạn biết đấy, một trong những điều tuyệt nhất khi làm Thống đốc bang của tôi là được nghe cô ấy hát chừng mỗi tháng một lần, thay vì năm thì mười họa.

    Bill Clinton

    Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast (1995)

Origin

In short

The phrase is far older than the calendar rule now quoted to explain it, and that rule began as somebody's mistake.

Timeline

  1. A pamphlet offers a blue moon as an example of plain absurdity.

  2. The eruption of Krakatoa turns the moon blue for months.

  3. A magazine article repeats the second-full-moon-in-a-month definition, born of a misreading.

The earliest uses are not about rarity at all. A pamphlet of 1528 offers a blue moon as an example of a plain absurdity — the sort of thing only a fool would accept on being told it. For a long time the phrase meant closer to never than to occasionally.

The moon does turn blue on rare occasions, when ash or smoke of the right particle size is high in the atmosphere; the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 produced blue moons for months. The familiar definition, a second full moon within one calendar month, is much more recent than either. It began as a misreading of the Maine Farmers' Almanac, was repeated in a magazine article in 1946, and is now quoted everywhere as though it were the original meaning.

So the phrase has drifted twice: from impossible to merely rare, and then into a definition it never had. It is used correctly by almost everyone and explained correctly by very few.

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