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SO ・ SHO
a ra i ・ u to i ・ u to mu ・ to o ru ・ to o su ・ ma ba ra
Glyph elements [ Toggle Font ]
Perhaps the source of the English expression「feeling blue」: elements are「squeezing bite, or, chopped with mattock」to create a「deformed child, one-armed or one-legged child (or both)」and「wasted effort.」The element「upside child, or, palming short leg」refers to a child who is or will become lost to the parents. Right elements combine as one meaning, to be「blue, stillborn」and as「inverted child」held「in palm bent and dripping, with much more than normal dripping」that suggests bleeding, possibly depicting the moment of parturition but a breech birth (with a foot or hand emerging first), dangerous for mother and baby due to blockage that was forcibly removed in order to save the life of the mother. A child who was not the proverbial bundle of joy, but a「bundle that was SHUNNED」(as depicted by the Japanese elements) due to a deformity, DREDGING, CLEARING A CHANNEL, REMOVING OBSTRUCTIONS, DIGGING A CANAL, NEGLIGENCE may arise due to a failure of the midwife to reposition the breech condition, or due to how the parents might treat such a disfigured child that survives, and that is with NEGLECT. Such a situation was certainly DISAGREEABLE for any parent and the child, and would often cause them to be ALIENATED, assuming he or she was not tossed into the nearest river (or worse) soon after birth, as infanticide was extremely common in the good old days of ubiquitous human cannibalism, replaced in modern times by abortion processes that still make it extremely common and more palatable for some folks.
External source definitions …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may include extended definitions, euphemisms, and mnemonics)
Chinese: to dredge; to clear away obstruction; thin; sparse; scanty; distant (relation); not close; to neglect; negligent; to present a memorial to the Emperor; commentary; annotation
Japanese EDRDG: pass through, note, commentary, estrangement, sparseness, neglect
Unihan extended: neglect; careless, lax
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
Japanese vocabulary: 7 entries
Chinese usage: 76 entries
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
Similar glyphs with related meanings: 53 entries
- Glyph.05651
- Strokes: 12
- grade_09
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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.