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ZO KU
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Right element as「valley」depicts rural, isolated, difficult to travel in or out and「people living in valleys」within the deep mountains were literally cut off from the rest of society for long periods, and considered backward, LOW CLASS, VULGAR, unstylish and CUSTOMARY, COMMON FOLK, hillbillies (in the U.S., Appalachian hill folk all named「Billie」for some odd reason), and so on, ridiculed since these folk were not living in the Big City.
Formerly, in rural settings way back in them thar hills, the only source of news was transmitted from person-to-person in the form of GOSSIP. Elements in this glyph could easily be read as「person」with「emitted from (another) person's mouth」in reference to gossip as a vulgar, low-class, and common but customary vice. Perhaps the glyph is subtly equating gossiping with indiscriminately passing flatulence, or pissing on another's reputation?
Modern definitions (that generally disregard history) …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may list only pigeonholed definitions, euphemisms, or meaningless mnemonics)
Chinese: custom; convention; popular; common; coarse; vulgar; secular
Japanese: layman, laity, man of the world, local manners, modern customs, common, popular, vulgar, low, as slang, commonly, cheap, worldly-minded
Unihan extended: social customs; vulgar, unrefined
EDRDG: vulgar; customs; manners; worldliness; mundane things
Always keep in mind that these glyphs were originally created by groups of clever old men as vulgar riddles and analogies for their own entertainment
(see 籒 for that)
and represented Chinese society many thousands of years ago, and not as a written or spoken language.
If these glyphs had been intended for language use, the sages could not have possibly designed a worse system.
Is it truly possible that all these glyphs started out as off-color jokes and puzzles? Yes! It is!
Sex had no shame in ancient China. Why would it? And now, there is a cover-up.
No one is suggesting these glyphs depict contemporary life in China, Japan, or anywhere else.
This site describes glyph meanings, not people.
These glyphs however, describe many and various things, including people, long before there were any notions of becoming politically incorrect.
The question to be answered is, should these glyphs continue being used, by anyone, anywhere, for expressing language?
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Despite how bad the human world is today, do you actually believe that the so-called good old days were any better? Or they could only have been worse?
By the way, with a limited number of the same elements used by the sages again and again to form these glyphs,
you should expect to find the same explanations again and again, as tedious as that may become, and as an inherent trait of any dictionary.
This site explains the dual meanings of glyphs most often ignored by other sources that provide you with only the sanctioned definition, generally.
Primal elements
Japanese vocabulary: 156 entries
Chinese usage: 108 entries
- Glyph.02849
- Strokes: 09
- jlpt-N2 grade_08
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This publication has included material from the MDBG free online English to Chinese dictionary files in accordance with the license provisions of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
This publication has included material from the JMdict (EDICT, etc.) dictionary files in accordance with the license provisions of the Electronic Dictionaries Research Group.
This publication has included material from the Unicode Character Database. Copyright © 1991-2016 Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed under these Terms of Use.