Pirates Trivia... Sort Of

When I worked at Disney we worked a lot with pins. One of the pins sets is a Pirates set (actually I think there are a lot of pirate sets) from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I can't remember if I wrote about it at the time, but each pin in this set had some sort of Chinese characters on it. I asked the Chinese people I worked with to translate for me.

One of the pins translated in English as "Pirates of the Caribbean" and another was "The Black Pearl." But there was one pin in the set that no one could really figure out the meaning of at the time.

I remember asking Jean. She couldn't think of a way to describe what it meant. "It's a Chinese saying." She would tell me. "It's complicated.

I asked Evan. He probably described it best of all the Chinese people I asked. He said, "It's hard to explain. But it means that if someone does a crime. And then they are killed.... then the secret goes with them." I still didn't get it. So he took my pen. "If I steal this pen. And then I die... I am the only person who knows that I took your pen though. There's no way for you to prove that it was I who took your pen. Yes? Okay. You get it."

I couldn't believe how just the two or three characters on a little pin could say all of that. I never got what the saying was in English. But then, a short time ago we were watching Pirates of the Caribbean and there was a line in that movie that made me realize the exact English translation of what my Chinese friends were trying to tell me. There is a short English saying that could be said in place of the description my Chinese friends gave me.

Can you figure out what it is? I'm gonna feel like an idiot if I'm the only one who had trouble making this connection. However, at the time it didn't even occur to me that we would have the same type of saying in English so I didn't really think about it.

I'll post the answer in my next post if no one gets it.