无可奈何
- Literal
- there is nothing that can be done
- Figurative
- To have no choice but to put up with something; you would change it if you could, but it's out of your hands.
Where does 无可奈何 come from?
There's no particular tale behind it. The core is 奈何, an old classical formula meaning roughly "what can be done about it?" or "how do you deal with this?"; 无可 puts a negation in front, so nothing at all can be done. The idiom therefore describes an attitude more than a fact: that of someone giving in to the inevitable. It appears as a predicate or, with 地, before a verb. One of its most famous uses is a line by the Song-dynasty poet Yan Shu: 无可奈何花落去 ("nothing to be done: the blossoms keep falling").
How is 无可奈何 used? Two examples
- 面对堵车，他也只能无可奈何地摇头。
Stuck in the traffic jam, all he could do was shake his head helplessly.
- 孩子哭着不肯上学，父母也无可奈何。
The kid cries and refuses to go to school, and there's nothing his parents can do.
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