COMPOUND IT ALL!

While browsing through the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty (a book put together a couple of centuries ago showcasing a minute fraction of what was written over a millenium before the present era, during what was a golden age), one word stood out that the poet had used merely because he could: 藁 ('gou'; a variant of 槁 meaning "straw, withered, hay, an old dead tree", used metaphorically to mean household implements and wifely tasks).

The poet was 柳宗元 ('lau jung yuen').

Mr. Lau was a poet and prose writer of the mid-Tang, whose life in many ways follows the customary path of several Chinese intellectuals. Initital scholarly success, and great official appointments, then falling afoul of the powers that were, followed by internal exile to some provincial backwater or hellhole, often so far from civilization that the buses didn't go there, with the unstated intent that he should perhaps die of a tropical disease and thus cease being a nuisance.


There's a county named 藁 in Northern China, as well as a city district (藁城區 'gou sing keui') that was already in existence two millenia ago. 藁城 was founded during Western Han (202 BCE – 9 CE).

Other than that, the word has scant use or usefulness.
If I'm ever in that area I shall have to visit.
It's now on my bucket list.

The list of obscure words that I cannot use in conversation without sounding like a stuck-up sticky wad is not as long as you would imagine, but it contains stuff from a number of different languages. It's greater than my swear-word vocabulary.
Which also includes several languages.


This is approximately and precisely as it should be.



昨夜裙帶解， 今朝蟢子飛。
鉛華不可棄， 莫是藁砧歸。
['jok ye kwan daai kaai, kam jiu hei ji fei, yuen waa bat ho hei, mok si gou jam gwai']

It's circumspeechily about a woman waking up in the morning after whompities and looking at her table of powders and make-up with slightly renewed enthusiasm. Google translate turns it into gibberish with a crawdaddy.



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