Speak-No-Evil Monkey

Your secret's safe — or they just said too much.

After you share something private, it's a zip-the-lips promise: they're not repeating it. Right after their own message, it flags something too honest, flirty or messy — a hand slapped over the mouth, “did I just say that?”

Where do the three wise monkeys come from?

A Japanese shrine carving that taught restraint.

The best-known version is carved over the sacred horse stable at Nikkō Tōshō-gū, a shrine in Japan whose rebuilding was completed in 1636. Monkeys were believed to protect horses, and the panel teaches children not to see, hear or say bad things. The names pun in Japanese: -zaru means “not” and echoes saru, “monkey,” so this one is iwazaru, “speaks not.”

A similar rule appears earlier in the Analects, the collected teachings of Confucius, though that doesn't prove the monkeys came from China. An 1894 travel guide to Japan described three-monkey stone reliefs as roadside devotional objects of Kōshin, a folk observance held on recurring “monkey days.” In English the saying often describes people who ignore wrongdoing; in a 1940 radio talk, President Franklin D. Roosevelt echoed “see no evil and hear no evil” against those who wanted the war's dangers left unexplained.