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

From:J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 27, 2004, 12:40
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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Garth Wallace <gwalla@...>Onomatopoeia [was Re: colours (out damn spot...;)]