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I have: '男儿有泪不轻弹' and later: ',理智的男子汉再悲伤也不轻易哭泣, 爱哭的男人走到哪儿都会被一票否决‘

否决: 对事物作否认的议决
一票: one ticket

So what does 一票否决 mean in this context? Seems to mean 'by everyone, completely rejected‘

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  • one vote, rejected/vetoed by one vote 怎么样?
    – user6065
    Jun 12, 2017 at 23:58
  • 一票 means 'one vote'
    – Tang Ho
    Jun 12, 2017 at 23:58
  • note veto power as implication: (see comment #1) 否决 can mean "veto" esp. when combined with 一票 (否决权 veto power;veto), see jukuu:1. 天津开发区环保局拥有对各种项目的一票否决权。... a veto with only one vote on all projects.2. 本文采用投票法“一票多次性否决”规则,... P2L2PC protocol adopt "one vote time after time veto" rule.
    – user6065
    Jun 13, 2017 at 3:55

4 Answers 4

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一票否决 means "rejected just because of that thing alone", i.e. "rejected by one vote". It comes from the sense of vetoing, but more specifically the kind of vetoing power the UN security council members get; i.e. whenever a single reject vote is cast, the entire thing is rejected. It is usually only in this sense that Mandarin uses the expression 一票否决. The vetoing power of the US president, for example, is simply expressed with 否决, and 一票否决 in that context would strike as highly unusual.

So you see, in an imagined "holistic evaluation", many parts are considered. So if something has the 一票否决 power, then it means that as long as that one thing is unacceptable, then the entirety is rejected.


It does not mean "rejected by anyone". In this sentence, the sense of "anyone" is conveyed by

走到哪儿都会

i.e. "no matter where he goes".

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  • 这就是‘newspeak'?这句话被孔子找不到,对吧?
    – Pedroski
    Jun 13, 2017 at 22:15
  • @Pedroski Do you mean "is this 'newspeak'? This kind of saying can be found in Confucius's speech, right", if so, yeah, Confucius spoke Old Chinese after all, which is drastically different from present-day Chinese languages. The reason you could still recognize Old Chinese to some extent is Chinese characters record what the words mean, and fortunately the meaning of most words have not changed significantly. Meanwhile languages make and discard words and expressions all the time. As for 一票否决, indeed you can't find it in older texts bc this expression must have appeared in the last century. Jun 13, 2017 at 22:39
  • @Pedroski wait sorry -- were you asking whether Confucius would be able to understand this phrase? He might not, even though the way this word is made is quite clear -- it is easy to tell the meaning from the composition characters. However, in Old Chinese 票 was apparently used to write another word meaning "fire blazing", "fast, agile", "to wave", and this word completely fell out of use (also pronounced differently; it's now written as 熛 only). Apparently people later borrowed character to mean what it means since recent antiquity: "ticket", "banknotes", "(paper with) certificate", "ballot". Jun 13, 2017 at 22:53
  • So he would stare blank at this character because he might be completely unaware of this meaning. 一 "one" and 否 "not, to negate, to deny, to say no, to disagree" are clear, and 决 how to close a relationship with water than it does now (like you see in 决堤), but apparently already had related meanings around that era, so the other three would be a lot easier for him to tell. Jun 13, 2017 at 23:01
  • Just realized I wrote "…can be found…" instead of "…can't be found…" in the first reply. This is indeed a new phrase, because Chinese people have only had the need to refer to this concept in the recent several decades. But if you mean this extended meaning, then it is definitely new. Jun 13, 2017 at 23:28
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'一票' here has double meanings:

  1. 一(same); 票(bill) = 'from the same shipment' = 'on the same side'

e.g. 你和他是一票人 (you and him are on the same side)

一票否决 can be interpreted as 'unanimously reject'

~

  1. 一(one) 票(vote)= one vote

Since '否决' means 'to reject' and '投票否决'(vote to reject) is a common phrase, 一票否决 can be interpreted as 'decisively reject' because one vote can only has one choice, which is decisive.

Simply put, 一票否决 means 'unanimously (and decisively) reject'

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一票否决 means veto. 一票 here does not necessarily involve a voting process. It basically means prevent or forbid authoritatively. It has a synonym with similar structure, 一枪枪毙, which literally means shoot to death with one bullet but figuratively means negate or repudiate.

If you look the term 一票否决 up in the corpus of Chinese language compiled by Peking University, you will find that the expression is rather novel. Because It was translated from veto or veto power.

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爱哭的男人走到哪儿都会"被一票否决" in this context means

"Everyone would hate" the man who usually cries when he encounters some problems or difficulties that he doesn't know how to solve them.

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