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SO U
ku wa
Glyph elements [ Toggle Font ]
Technically, the mulberry is a tree, but note that untended mulberry plants grow with densely-packed and closely-spaced branches beginning at nearly ground level, and so are often referred to by the misnomer of 'mulberry bush.' Silk-producing caterpillars especially enjoy ingesting MULBERRY leaves, appearing as mottled flecks of white all over the wood.
Eating ripe mulberries while picking them from the branches often causes long reddish-purple lines of juice to run down one's hands and forearms in stripes (see 条), especially as the picker loses concentration and begins to greedily grasp for more and more of the juicy, fleshy berries without exercising the necessary care and caution (桑!). Mulberry juice stains a deep blood-red color. The skin of mulberry fruit is easily burst, and each plump berry contains many seeds.
It would seem the sages intentionally designed the lower elements to resemble both「tree」and「hemp」since mulberry trees and hemp were related in ancient China as sources of materials for clothing, so much so that one old nickname for China was the「land of mulberry and hemp」:
「The mulberry plant was venerated because it was the food upon which silkworms fed, and silk was one of China's most important products. But silk was very expensive and only the very wealthy could afford silken fabric. For the vast millions of less fortunate [means], cheaper material had to be found. Such material was typically hemp.」
[ https://druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/history/first12000/1.htm 2012-08-08 ]
Always keep in mind that these glyphs most likely were originally designed by groups of clever old men as vulgar riddles for their own entertainment
(see 籒 for that),
representing Chinese society many thousands of years ago, but intended NOT as a written or spoken language when created.
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, and often with multiple correct answers to each riddle, the same as is true today.
Sex had no shame in ancient China.
Why would it?
But, have there been necessary rewrites and altered explanations of the original elemental meanings over the centuries?
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?
(More...)
Despite how seemingly bad our human existence is today, do you actually believe that the so-called good old days were any better?
Or could they 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 lexicon.
This site explains multiple meanings of glyphs ignored or censored by other sources, generally as being too embarrassing to admit today.
Primal elements
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
Similar glyphs with related meanings: 13 entries
- Glyph.03667
- Strokes: 10 ~ 09
- censored
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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.
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