Paper Tiger Origin

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. How are y’all doing?

Doing great. How are you?

And who are you?

Good. My name’s Mateo. I’m calling from Richmond, Virginia.

We’re glad to have you. What’s up?

Well, I had a question about the term paper tiger. I’d always thought that it had something to do with German counterintelligence during World War II.

I know a tiger was a type of German tank, and I thought that the Germans would leave false documents around kind of inflating the numbers of tanks that they had in different battalions to kind of throw the Allies off while they were making maneuvers around Europe.

So, yeah, I’m just kind of curious as to what the origin of that phrase is.

Wow, that’s an interesting theory. And I do love watching those documentaries about all different ways that the psychological warfare that each side tried to confuse the other during World War II, like inflatable tanks or bases that didn’t exist or planting false documents on dead bodies so they’d be captured by the enemy.

But paper tiger does not come from tiger tanks during World War II.

Oh, wow.

No, even more interesting. As a matter of fact, it comes from Chinese.

Oh.

It’s a kiaok, as they call it, where a word is directly translated word for word from one language to another.

So in Chinese, I’m going to do my best here, it’s something like zhi lao hu or zu lao fu, literally paper tiger.

Even though the term dates back quite a ways, it didn’t become well-known, popular, until Mao Zedong, the former leader of the People’s Republic of China, would use it in interviews and in stories where he was talking about his opponents or the United States being paper tigers.

That is, they looked fearsome, but they were weak.

He would talk about his internal Chinese opponents in the same way, called them reactionaries and paper tigers.

It’s somebody who puts on a good front but can’t back it up.

Oh, well, maybe that’s where I picked up that connotation.

You know, I guess it just kind of filtered into my understanding of German history.

But that’s really fascinating.

We often talk on the show about popularization versus coining, and that’s what happened here.

Mao Zedong popularized the term, but didn’t coin it.

And it’s not surprising, since he was one of the leaders of one of the major countries of the world, that this term paper tiger was passed to other languages, not just English.

But in the 1800s, when it came up, it was usually people talking about Chinese or Chinese culture.

Oh, okay.

Mateo, it was a really great question. I’m glad you asked it.

Oh, yeah. No, thank you. Thank you so much for the insight on it. I really never would have thought it came from Chinese.

Yeah, I bet that.

Yeah, yeah. Really, really.

Yeah. You know English borrows wherever it pleases.

Yeah. Well, thank you all so much. I really appreciate it.

Our pleasure. Call again sometime. Thanks for being with us, Mateo.

Good talking with you, Mateo.

Bye-bye.

Great talking with you, too. Thank you. Bye-bye.

The whole idea is that a tiger, a real tiger, is fierce, but a paper is fragile.

So you’re not getting what it looks like on the outside.

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