📖 Meaning
Using the eyes to eat and the ears to see—a vivid metaphor for confusing or reversing the proper functions of things. It describes a state of topsy-turvy disorder where one fails to grasp what should be obvious, mixing up means and ends entirely.
📜 Origin Story
This idiom comes from Sima Guang's work '迂书·官失' (The Book of Pedantry, chapter 'Official Failings') during the Northern Song Dynasty. Sima Guang, the renowned historian and statesman, lamented that in his time, 'few indeed are those in the world who do not use their ears to see and their eyes to eat.' He was criticizing officials who had lost their sense of proper roles and responsibilities, doing things completely backwards. The phrase captured the absurdity of people abandoning their natural faculties and duties, and it later became a set idiom for any situation of muddled confusion.
💡 Example Usage
他做事目食耳视，完全搞错了方向。
He works in a completely topsy-turvy way, having mistaken the entire direction of things.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 目食耳视
- Pinyin: mù shí ěr shì
- Literal Translation: eye eat, ear look
- Category: Logic
- Characters: 4