戛然而止

Pronunciation: jiá rán ér zhǐ Literal meaning: A sharp sound, then silence

Origin & Usage

戛然 is a sound-word — a hard, clean noise, used of a bird's cry — and 而止 is what follows it: and then it stopped. The parsing matters, because the pairing 斗然而来，戛然而止 sets an abrupt arrival against an abrupt ending. It comes from Zhang Xuecheng, and not as praise: the sentence appears in an essay cataloguing ten faults of prose writing, where he allows that the effect can happen of itself but calls contriving it a standing weakness of literary men. That reservation has been lost. Chinese now applies the phrase to anything that stops mid-motion, a speech, a career, a piece of music, and the judgement depends entirely on what it was that stopped.

Examples

English: "The music ended abruptly in the middle of the performance"

Chinese: 音乐在演出中突然戛然而止