I have to think if I want to stay in such a cruel country as China:

While looking up a totally innocent character (司), Babylon also returned another one (which it sometimes does, don’t know why):

刖

v. (

Trad

=刖

, Pinyin

=yue4) cut off the feet

Wow, I thought, how cruel must a culture be that it is able to express cutting off the feet in just one single character!

That certainly raised my curiosity. So I searched various dictionaries and came across the following other interesting characters:

兀 wù /(surname)/cut off the feet/rising to a height; towering/bald/

Ey, yet another one for cutting off feet! I don’t believe it, aparently 2 different methods available, hm?

劓

v. (Trad=劓, Pinyin=yi4) cut off the nose

Certainly, cutting off the feet is not always appropriate…especially if the person in question is alread punished and now a 躄…

I searched even deeper, and here is my shocking result: The Chinese culture is able to describe various methods of punishment by cutting off parts of the human body in just one character each, and even for the resulting people there’s sometimes one character enough:

SimplifiedTraditionalPinyinEnglish Meaning
刖yue4cut off the feet as punishment
兀wu4cut off the feet
劓yi4cut off the nose
刵er4cut off the ears as punishment
剐剮gua3cut off the flesh as punishment
躄bi4both feet crippled
衄nü4nosebleed

I am thinking if I want to stay here….better run before I can’t no longer….

Categories: Shanghai

Originally Created: 10/26/2005 03:40:37 PM
Last Edited: 10/26/2005