Sunday, January 30, 2005

Encounter with an Unknown "Dragon" Character





While browsing through Amazon.com for textbooks, I saw this Chinese dragon T-shirt for sale by ChoiceShirts. The odd thing is that the character on the shirt does not mean "dragon" (), matter of fact, I have never seen it before in my life.



The closest two characters I can find are these, which there is no connection with dragon:



= come across, meet with, encounter

= enlighten, advance; progress



7 comments:

  1. I'm wondering if it's a really poorly drawn chosen because they picked it out as 'fu'(insterad of )in the dictionary, which they probably used to mean that it's a fu dog image.

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  2. Perhaps it's supposed to be the first of the two characters you give, and read "Enter the Dragon"? (Bruce Lee's first American movie, which a bit of googling would have informed the designer is Long zheng hu dou, 龍爭虎鬥 [錄影資料] -- http://library.hku.hk/record=b1983640.)

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  3. That isn't a dragon in any case, is it? Looks more like your standard dog/lion/beast thingy that stands on either side of the temple entrance.

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  4. 曺 and 曹 are same word written differently.

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  5. Silly me, I think I recognize that symbol from playing Mahjongg on the PC!

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  6. If it is indeed a variant of 遭, when that character is used to write 遭う [あう] in Japanese, the use of that particular kanji carries the connotation that the meeting is undesirable (the specific wording of the usage note in my Japanese-text-input-system-thinger is 「好ましくないことに」).

    It's possible that the character was chosen to indicate that the creature pictured (or the person wearing the shirt) is not someone you'd want to run into.

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