Good Stress, Bad Stress (cont): Does "Crisis" Really = "Opportunity" + Danger"?

The American Institute of Stress has a nice biographical essay on Hans Selye, the "father" of stress theory and research. If you scroll about halfway down, you'll see a little blurb about how the closest Chinese word to signify stress is a composite of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity" which can be translated as "crisis." (Interestingly enough, it runs immediately to the right of a photo of a postcard that Hans Selye sent to Paul Rosch in-- well, you can't tell what year it was, but it was likely before 1963, because there's no ZIP code on the destination address-- and the text is "In Japan the word for stress is..." followed by a kanji character. Japanese, Chinese-- whatever.)

Now this concept of stress = crisis = (danger + opportunity) is kinda neat, isn't? (In fact, I distinctly remember, in the mid 1980's, how an Atlanta-based consultancy marketed materials around technology and organizational change that incorporated the logograph for "crisis" (wēijī) and made extensive reference to things like "opportunity ratings" and "danger ratings." Heck, a couple of years later, I even worked a reference to this into a paper I wrote for an advisory committee I was on at the time.)

Well, it may be neat, but is it accurate? Evidently not, according to these articles (here and here) originating either directly or indirectly from the UPenn Chinese language faculty.

Too bad. Don't you hate it when facts get in the way of nifty constructs?