Over the last few months, I have seen several amazing examples of Chinese ideographs that perfectly captured an idea with just a few strokes.
But last week, I came across a character that seemed to me to be entirely misapplied. It would have been just perfect to describe something else. I suspect the original person who thought of the ideograph did intend to use it correctly, but later unimaginative scholars couldn't see the obvious picture it was evoking, and applied it wrongly to another concept.
The character is 笔 bǐ, and against all my instincts, it means "pen".
To me, the character screams "scorpion". Just look at it!
How can something that so obviously looks like a scorpion (two pincers/pedipalps, six legs, and a tail) be used to mean something completely unrelated? It makes no sense to me.
I'm actually a bit upset at the waste. 我 很 难过 wǒ hěn nánguò.
I console myself with a mnemonic. The pronunciation of the character 笔 ("bǐ") happens to be the first syllable of the Hindi word बिच्छू bichchhu, which means scorpion. And it also sounds like "Bic", which is a brand of pen.
China dropped the ball there, and India picked it up for half a point.
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