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Matt Jenkins writes:

Jichang Lulu wrote about 㞞 on the Language Log back in March [see "Selected readings" below], but that post didn't include any reference to (U+2AA0A).

If you want to see what this mysterious character looks like, you can find it here — with some really esoteric variants (N.B.).

Matt asks a good question about "why is the character practically completely absent from character sets and dictionaries?" That's hard to say, especially since it's a heck of a lot simpler to write than 㞞, which it is equal to. One surmise I have is that the mystery character is visually somehow reminiscent of that very nasty character "cào 肏" ("f*ck") (graphically "enter" + "flesh / meat") as in "cào nǐ mā 肏你媽" ("f*ck your mom"), which is beyond the pale, even for all but the most hardened garbage mouth. Of course, one can always, and usually does, avoid "cào 肏" by punningly writing it as cāo 操 ("exercise").

Another possibility is that (U+2AA0A) echoes the shape of the notorious bī 屄 (vulgar "vulva or / and vagina"), which is similarly nearly always replaced by the homophones 逼 or B.

For whatever reason people are avoiding writing the "real" glyph for (U+2AA0A), the enigma of its being missing from character sets, dictionaries, and fonts points to an inalterable verity about the Sinographic writing system: it is essentially open-ended and the number of its potential discrete constituents is infinite. The artist Xú Bīng 徐冰 (b. 1955) proved that with his monumental, epochal installation (1988), "Tiān shū 天書 / 天书" ("Book from the Sky") and other art works (see also "Selected readings"). Anyone, anywhere, anytime can create his or her very own hanzi / kanji / hanja 漢字 / 汉字 ("Sinoglyph") — and many do. One can even advocate combining them with emoji.

Selected readings

• "Mandarin and Manchu semen" (3/11/22)
• "Hokkien in Sino-Japanese script" (2/2/21)
• "Semen, green rice and the rate of internet decay" (12/5/04)
• "Big WHAT hall" (12/1/15)
• "Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon Classics " (8/30/13)
• "Franco-Croatian Squid in pepper sauce " (3/12/09)
• "Punning banned in China " (11/29/14)
• "Banned in Beijing " (6/4/14)
• "When intonation overrides tone " (6/4/13)

——-

• "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20)
• "Hanmoji" (9/4/22)
• "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
• "Sinographs by the numbers" (1/22/19)
• "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12) — includes a long section on the artist Xu Bing's "Book from the Sky"
• "How to generate fake Chinese characters automatically" (12/30/15)
• "Chinese characters formed from letters of the alphabet" (8/20/14)
• "Is there a practical limit to how much can fit in Unicode?" (10/27/17)
• "Character crises" (6/15/18)

September 9, 2022 @ 10:00 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Colloquial, Semantics, Slang, Variation, Writing systems

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