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" (龍), 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:
遭 = come across, meet with, encounter
迪 = enlighten, advance; progress
I'm wondering if it's a really poorly drawn 缚 chosen because they picked it out as 'fu'(insterad of 福)in the dictionary, which they probably used to mean that it's a fu dog image.
ReplyDeletePerhaps 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.)
ReplyDeleteThat 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.
ReplyDelete曺 and 曹 are same word written differently.
ReplyDeleteSilly me, I think I recognize that symbol from playing Mahjongg on the PC!
ReplyDeleteAccording to 《異體字字典》 (Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants) the character is a variant of 遭.
ReplyDelete-Claw
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」).
ReplyDeleteIt'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.