Many people pay a lot of money for face and body mud (泥) treatments. Maybe that is one reason why people like to garden or make things from mud. You must get your hands dirty.

“Getting your hands dirty” is a useful expression. And it has two uses. The first one is for honest, hardworking people. If I am willing to get my hands dirty, it means I am willing to do the hard work of a project myself. I do not give the dirty work to others.

For example, let’s say my good friend is running for city leader. There is a lot of hard work needed to win an election (选举). So, I help gather signatures (签名) to get her on the election list. I walk around neighborhoods and pass out information to hundreds of people. She does too. She is not afraid to get her hands dirty and neither is her team of volunteers. When she wins, she thanks us all for our hard work.

Okay, now it is four years later. My friend has been in office and has become very powerful. In fact, you could say that power has gone to her head. She is thinking uncleanly and illegally (非法地) when she asks me to do her a favor. That brings us to the other way we use the expression “get your hands dirty.” This way is for dishonest people.

Let’s imagine that my friend, the Mayor, calls me into her office and asks me to do something for her—something illegal. She wants me to ask a building developer for money for her re-election. In return she will give him some city business.

She promises me that nothing will happen. But she simply can’t risk getting her hands dirty. I tell her that I really can’t risk going to prison (监狱). I also tell her that we are no longer friends.

What would you do if someone did something you didn’t agree with? Would you completely stop talking to them? Or would you tell them how their actions were wrong?

The “cancel culture” trend has been picking up some steam recently. According to Dictionary.com, “cancel culture” is defined as “publicly rejecting, boycotting or ending support for particular people or groups because of their socially or morally unacceptable views or actions”.

Neelam, a 17-year-old high school senior in the US, told The New York Times that she wasn’t being sensitive when she saw someone doing something wrong and “called them out” for it.

However, others think that “canceling” people is counterproductive and can actually be harmful to the person.

To Ben, a high school junior in Providence, Rhode Island, US, canceling someone “takes away the option for them to learn from their mistakes and kind of alienates them”. Ben, 17, thinks that people should be held accountable for their actions, regardless if they are your friend or someone famous.

In fact, quite a few celebrities have already faced the wrath of cancel culture. Some celebrities who have been “canceled” this year include British author of the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling, US comedian Ellen DeGeneres and English guitarist Eric Clapton.

And, over the summer, about 150 public figures like authors J.K. Rowling and Margaret Atwood signed an open letter against the cancel culture trend. The letter expressed that cancel culture was hurting people’s freedom of expression in areas like the arts, universities and journals.

Professor Loretta Ross, who teaches a university course on cancel culture, is trying to fight back against this new trend. “It really does alienate people, and makes them fearful of speaking up,” she told The New York Times. Ross also noted that cancel culture isn’t new: “What’s new is the virality and the speed and the anonymity.”

Our world is beautiful because of the wonderful mix of different cultures, ideas and opinions. So, the next time you think someone should be “called out” or “canceled”, maybe try calling them in instead.

People often ask which is the most difficult language to learn, and it is not easy to answer because there are too many factors to take into consideration. Firstly, in a first language the difficulties are unimportant as people learn their mother tongue naturally, so the question of how hard a language is to learn only makes more sense when learning a second language.

A native speaker of Spanish, for example, will find Portuguese much easier to learn than a native speaker of Chinese because Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, while Chinese is very different, so first language can affect learning a second language. The greater the differences between the second language and our first language, the harder it will be for most people to learn. Many people answer that Chinese is the hardest language to learn, possibly influenced by the thought of learning the Chinese writing system, and the pronunciation of Chinese does appear to be very difficult for many foreign learners. However, for Japanese speakers, who already use Chinese characters in their own language, learning writing will be less difficult than for speakers of languages using the Roman alphabet.

Some people seem to learn languages easily, while others find it very difficult. Teachers and the circumstances in which the language is learned also play an important role, as well as each learner’s motivation for learning. If people learn a language because they need to use it professionally, they often learn it faster than people studying a language that has no direct use in their day to day life.

Obviously, British diplomats and other embassy staff have found that the second hardest language is Japanese, which will probably come as no surprise to many, but the language that they have found to be the most problematic is Hungarian, which uses a similar alphabet to English but has 35 cases (forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc). This does not mean that Hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everyone, but it causes British diplomatic personnel, who are generally used to learning languages, the most difficulty. However, Tabassaran, a Caucasian language has 48 cases, so it might cause more difficulty if British diplomats had to learn it.

Different cultures and individuals from those cultures will find different languages more difficult. Therefore, it is impossible to say that there is one language that is the most difficult language in the world.