Daily Inspiration Quote by Hu Shih

“Trivial incidents” is doing sly, strategic work here. Hu Shih is narrating the birth of a linguistic revolution as if it were an accident in a dorm hallway: a few annoyances, a few misunderstandings, and suddenly the weight of an empire’s written tradition is up for debate. That downplaying isn’t modesty so much as an argument about how modernity actually happens. Big reforms don’t always arrive with banners; sometimes they begin with friction - the petty, daily costs of a system that no longer fits.

The context sharpens the line. It’s 1915: China is reeling after the fall of the Qing, intellectuals are searching for tools strong enough to rebuild public life, and students abroad are absorbing the pragmatism and experimental spirit of American universities. Cornell becomes a laboratory where “Chinese” is no longer sacred inheritance but a technology to be redesigned. Hu’s framing quietly rejects the idea that language reform requires permission from tradition’s gatekeepers. A handful of students can initiate it because the need is already baked into experience.

The subtext is political without sounding like a manifesto. Reforming the written language - moving away from elite classical forms toward a vernacular usable by ordinary people - is a democratic project disguised as an academic one. By tracing it to “trivial” triggers, Hu also insulates the movement from accusations of ideological conspiracy or foreign contamination. It wasn’t imported whole; it emerged from ordinary problems met by ordinary minds. That’s the modernist wager: the everyday is where revolutions start, and the most consequential changes often begin as irritations.