Re: CHAT: colours (out damn spot...;)

In a message dated 2004:04:27 08:42:23 AM, theiling@ABSINT.COM writes:

>Hi!
    HiYa! ::BiG GRiNNie::

>J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...> writes:
>>...
>>     In quite a number of cultures, white is the colour of skulls & bone(s),
>> mourning, death, etc. In many older southern Chinese and Asian
jungle-dwelling
>> tribal cultures, jade is the colour of purity and of talismanic
>> power/protection - hence IMHO the modern-day Southern Chinese obsession
>with jade jewelry.
>
>Ah, right, I remember two things: my Chinese friend did not like white
>candles at dinner because they reminded her of funerals.
    Bad _feng shui_ ya know... food with taint of death... Yech!
    Bad idea if ya want to continue with that or any _normal_ friendship...
    The closest equivalency I can think of is putting colour photos of
medical autopsies on the dinner table as a centre piece. A real appetite killer for
most people (I am not gonna make any sweepin' generalizations as I have had
the misfortune of coming across some real wacked-out, supposedly human people
who would think nothing wrong with autopsy pix at din-din time... or even worse
- I will just leave that unsaid & to your vivid, twisted imaginations.)

>  Fortunately,
>I had red candles, too. :-)
    Rot ist Gut _Fung Swei_ Energie a la "Good Vibrations"!... Er, sorta...
the Hippie Californian analogy kinda sucks BigTime...

>And I remember the Chinese word for 'flaw that makes a piece of jade
>perfect.'  Unfortunately I forgot the Mandarin word.  It's one
>morpheme, of course. :-)
    I don't know Mandarin for jade terms. But 2 o' the more common Cantonese
are [in unaccented/non-official Romanized Cantonese - "CantoRomanization"]:

        _fei-chui_ und _yuk_

    BTW the Japanese word for 'flaw that makes a whole perfect' is _sabi_  -
it also has connotations of: 'beauty in age, patina'... _wabi_, a related
aesthetic term means 'freshness, newness' in the "Less is More"/"Small is
Beautiful" sense of things.
    Big OBConlang/Conculture: Think up aesthetic terms that are different
from your native NatLang(s)! Some of the best ones are Japanese Zen-related *
(and they also have some the most intriguing onomatopoeia as well... big clue:
Pikachu is just the tip of that iceberg!)

* I am kinda biased - Japanese Zen is Taoist-influenced via Chinese Ch'an
Buddhism

    And since this about colours... TaDada! the Cantonese colours in all
their unaccented glory:

        white: _baak-sik_
        black: _hak-sik_
        grey: _fooi-sik_
        silver: _ngan-sik_
        brown: _fe-sik_
        beige: _mai-sik_
        yellow: _wong-sik_
        golden: _gam-sik_
        orange: _chaang-sik_
        pink: _fan hung-sik_
        red: _hung-sik_
        violet: _ji-sik_
        indigo: _din laam-sik_
        blue: _laam-sik_
        green: _luk-sik_

    ... and all of the above can be modified with:

        dark: _sam_
        light: _chin_
        bright/vivid: _sin_

    I should have been asleep hours ago... but it's too bleedin' hot in the
San Francisco Bay Area right bloody now...
so, of course, I turn on my glorified-heater-of-a-Mac to do this email thus
generating MORE HEAT... go figger...

    Next time some blinkin' idiot says there is no such thing as Global
Warming to my face, I am gonna frikkin' tongue-lash 'em into bleedin' next year...

---
Hanuman Zhang, _Gomi no sensei_ [Master of junk] <A
HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A>

    "To live is to scrounge, taking what you can in order to survive. So,
since living is scrounging, the result of our efforts is to amass a pile of
rubbish." ~ ChuangTzu/Zhuangzi, China, 4th Century BCE

    "...So what is life for? Life is for beauty and substance and sound and
colour; and even those are often forbidden by law [socio-cultural conventions].
. .Why not be free and live your own life? Why follow other people's rules
and live to please others?..." ~ Lieh-Tzu/Liezi, Taoist Sage (c. 450- 375 BCE)

    "Taoism in a nutshell: Shit Happens. Roll with the Punches. Hang 10 ~ Go
with the Flow!" ~ anon. California Surfer~Beatnik, c.1950's/1960's

    "[The modern economist] is used to measuring the 'standard
of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the
time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man
who consumes less.
    "A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively
irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-
being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being
with the minimum of consumption." ~ E.F. Schumacher, _Small is Beautiful_

    "Western man not merely blighted in some degree every
culture that he touched, whether 'primitive' or advanced, but he also
robbed his own descendants of countless gifts of art and craftsmanship,
as well as precious knowledge passed on only by word of mouth
that disappeared with the dying languages of dying peoples...." ~ Lewis
Mumford, _The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine_

    "Anarchism's great project is to dissolve the asymmetry of power. How?
There are thousands of alternatives and there is not only one solution. To
advance 'one' solution would be a doctrine of power, a manifestation of power." ~
Venezuelan University Academic Alfredo Vallota quoted in _El Libertario_

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