This is one of my favorite Chinese idioms. It’s pronounced ma ma hu hu in Chinese.

It’s meaning?

So-so.

Go figure. How you get “so-so” out of two horses and two tigers is beyond me.

L

After the tigers have eaten the horses they are not eager for heavy exercise therefore they are so-so.

If you think about it, why does so-so mean so-so? So is used as an adverb that intensifies an adjective (so hot, so cold, so terrible, so good). How, then, do two of them together come to mean “mediocre” or “unexciting”?

Most likely its a contraction of “Not so good, not so bad.”

Contractions are never so-so. Ask any mother.