Chapter 28 Section 4 Nose · Broom

The group of characters to be described now is centered on the character "自". "自" originally meant "nose".This character is written in oracle bone inscriptions Riddles are an intellectual game with a long history that Chinese people love.Due to the complex structure and variety of Chinese characters, they are often used as materials for making riddles, which are called "anagrams".There is an anagram that is: "Just because I am a little arrogant, it makes everyone hate me." The answer to the riddle is the word "smelly". The original meaning of "smelly" is smell, and later it mostly refers to unpleasant and annoying smells.The Chinese value modesty and think that conceitedness is hated by others.However, from the perspective of philology, "smelly" is a ideographic character composed of "自" and "狗(狗)".The ancients have long discovered that a dog’s nose is the sharpest and can best recognize smells, and smells are related to the nose, so the word “smelly” has to have a “self” as a component, and then add a “mouth” to form the word “smell”. It refers to the action of distinguishing smell.

The word formed by "鼻" is also very interesting: 劓〔yi〕, from the nose to the knife (刂), cut off the prisoner's nose with a knife, which is a punishment in ancient China; Snoring while sleeping, heavy breath from the nose; 齁 [hou Hou Yinping], is a taste that makes the nose and throat feel uncomfortable (such as too salty or too sweet); (nasal ugly) [nv female Qusheng] , is nasal bleeding, a common disease. In order to illustrate the traditional view of women in Chinese society, we will introduce a small group of Chinese characters centered on the word "broom". Ancient writing of "broom" ,In the shape of a broom,It is a bracket for placing the broom.This character is the pictogram of broom, a noun.Later, the word "hand (扌)" was added to become "sweeping (sweeping)", which refers to the action of sweeping the floor with a broom, a verb.

The most interesting thing is to add the word "female" as "women (women)", which refers to women.China entered a patrilineal clan society very early, and the division of labor between men and women is extremely strict. There is a saying that "men rule outside, women rule inside", or "men farm and women weave".This can be seen from the structure of Chinese characters: the character "man" means a person who works with "strength" in the "field"; woman means "women", who use a broom to sweep the floor at home.Of course, the latter’s work is far more than just sweeping the floor, but also weaving, cooking, taking care of children, and feeding livestock...