Professor Victor H. Mair, whose piece on the character-related myth that crisis = danger + opportunity is one of the most popular readings here on Pinyin Info, sent in the following on a variation he has encountered:

Amazing!!! The Chinese are made to have a saying for **every** silly idea that anybody ever dreamed up. As if the “crisis = danger + opportunity” one were not bad enough, people are now compounding the problem by tacking on “chaos”!

The second item is even more unreal. From bad to worse, compounding of compounding.

California congressman Jim Costa speaking:

“So, the fact is, is that. . . . I mean, in crisis — what are the two Chinese symbols for the word “crisis”? One symbolizes in the Chinese alphabet[!!] “chaos,” and the other one reflects . . . . or defines “opportunity.” And so, through crisis and chaos . . . . or through chaos and opportunity you have a crisis. [VHM: THIS IS ***UNREAL***.] I mean, it’s unfortunate during this budget time. During the last three budget recessionary cycles that we lived with, I tried to — of course, I was one of the leaders at the time, in ’91 and ’92 — to get the folks to use this as an opportunity to look at taking a step back and to see how California, how much of our budget was now on autopilot….” (source)

UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!!!!!! And now they even invent an improbable, trisyllabic gloss/pseudoword: w?izh?ngj? (“incipient moment in the midst of danger,” which the exegetically-minded coiner obviously wanted to interpret as “*opportunity in the midst of danger”).

Oh, woe is me! Perhaps the person who concocted this oddity had gotten wind of my deconstruction of the bisyllabic term and rushed to its defense with an explicit “center, midst” to stick in the middle! Sorry, buster, that’s not enough. The main thing you have to fix is the last syllable.

And this is another one that keeps coming up.

(With thanks to Michael Carr and Ivan Aymat for references.)