Thursday, April 21, 2011

from: Tanya A.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 4:07 PM
subject: another stupid tattoo question

Dear Tian,

I just ran across your blog and love it!

Question: about ten years ago I took the character for "Courage" that I found in a Chinese Dictionary into a tattoo parlor. I really wanted the character for "courage" on my back, but the dictionary said that the character also stood for "gall bladder."

I wasn't sure that I actually wanted the character for "gall bladder" on my back, so when I saw a character that also supposedly meant "courage" on a sign full of symbols and pictures hanging on the tattoo parlor wall I said to myself, "tattoo parlors don't lie!" and asked for that one instead.

I was recently told by a Chinese friend that my tattoo actually says "Dog Passing."

(I've known for years that the second character says "passing," but only recently found out about the "dog" part. I was told that this particular symbol for dog is archaic, which is why many of the non-Asian students of Chinese and Japanese that I asked before didn't know it....)

I'm hoping you might verify.

Thank you!



It is not "dog passing" or 犬過.

大過 [たいか] serious error; gross mistake

8 comments:

  1. It is so poorly done I could see either 大过 or 犬过。It depends on whether that dot at the top right of the left is for the 犬 or the 辶 radical. Perhaps 大过 seems a bit more likely though.

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  2. Oh, that's really a classic. This should go in the handbook. :-)

    Yeah, it was a gross mistake to trust that tattoo parlor.

    But why should that character (if the dot is assumed to belong to the "dog") be considered archaic?

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  3. I don't quite know why someone would call the character 犬 "archaic." It is the most common word in modern Japanese for the ordinary domestic dog. I think that 狗 is more common than 犬 in modern Chinese, though. Perhaps a Chinese speaker can set us straight.

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  4. I don't think that 犬 is archaic in Chinese either. It is used in 狂犬病, mad dog disease or rabies as we call it.

    Not something you talk about on a daily basis, but also not archaic.

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  5. 犬and狗 are synonyms ;) we Chinese use 狗 more than 犬. Indeed, 犬is archaic,we don't point at a dog today and say 犬,we'd say 狗. Most archaic essays I studied used 犬more than 狗, fyi

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  6. The part about the character being archaic seemed to be speculation to explain why nobody recognized it. A simpler explanation is that it's so poorly written as to be completely unrecognizable.

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  7. There are a lot of words in English that are archaic in isolation, but part of currently used compound words--we don't say "cob" for spider anymore, but "cobweb" is as common as "spiderweb". Is this a similar situation with 犬, where you wouldn't refer to someone's pet 犬 but it is still used in compounds?

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  8. You want archaic? 大過 is the name of Hexagram 28 in the "I Ching", where it means something like "Greatly Exceeding" and would no doubt be taken as something positive.

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