小人

In the oldest usage, 小人 was sociology, not ethics: the small people, commoners, farmers, and servants, as against 大人, the great, the lords and officeholders. The pairing survives in fossil form: 大人 is the standard word for "adult" (and the "Your Honor" of every courtroom drama), while imperial-era commoners called themselves 小人 before officials, a humble first-person pronoun that period television keeps in every viewer's ear.

The Analects performed the semantic surgery that made the word permanent. Confucius systematically re-paired 君子 and 小人 by character rather than birth: the gentleman is whoever acts like one, and the petty man is whoever schemes like one, whatever his rank. It is one of the quiet radicalisms of the text, moving both words from the social register to the moral one, and the language never moved them back. Calling a duke's son a 小人 became possible, and calling a poor scholar a 君子 became praise worth having.

The Analects rarely defines the 君子 directly; it defines him against the 小人, in a long series of paired verdicts of which the table holds the most quoted. The rhetorical structure did lasting work: it made the petty man the gentleman's permanent shadow, the thing self-cultivation is cultivation away from. Note what the contrasts pick out: not crime but orientation. The 小人 calculates advantage (利), conforms to whoever is present, blames outward, and worries constantly, the last diagnosis (长戚戚, forever fretting) being the tradition's sharpest observation, that pettiness is exhausting from the inside. The full portrait of the other half of the pair lives in this guide's 君子 entry.

Modern usage has narrowed the word to its sharpest edge: the 小人 is the backstabber, the colleague who smiles in the meeting and reports you afterward, the relative who stirs discord at the family banquet. 背后捅刀子的小人 ("the petty man who knifes you from behind") is the full indictment; 我们公司有小人 is the sighed diagnosis of a poisoned office. The accusation is serious enough that it is usually made about someone, rarely to them. Folk practice takes the threat literally: 防小人 (guarding against petty people) is a recognized category in temple culture and feng shui retail, from Villain Hitting (打小人), the Hong Kong street ritual of beating a paper figure of one's tormentor with a shoe, to cinnabar charms sold against workplace treachery.

One idiom rehabilitates the word with self-aware humor: 先小人，后君子 ("petty men first, gentlemen after") means settling money and terms explicitly up front so the friendship survives the deal, spoken while passing the contract across the table. It concedes the Confucian point while filing a practical amendment: a little scheduled pettiness now prevents the real kind later.