Know Your Picture Characters Entry #78

November 7th, 2011 by Wordsman

A. 瓜二つ B. 瓜田 C. 南瓜 D. 胡瓜 E. 西瓜 F. 西洋南瓜

In retrospect, I really should have done this a week earlier, so that the answers would be given on Halloween.  It feels a little silly to be talking about pumpkins a week later.

You all got that we were talking about pumpkins, right?  Good.

Theoman sits alone in that dark, damp patch, his head slumped against a splintery fence post, his eyes still open only through sheer force of will.  Midnight has long since past.  His friends–and perhaps, too, his senses–have long since abandoned him.  But he stays, and he waits, for he knows, deep inside his heart, that it will come.  It must come.  And then, all of a sudden, there it is: rising above a hill in the middling distance, its shadowy form cast against the slowly sinking moon.  He was right!  His faith was rewarded!  At last he will see, he will gaze upon . . . the Great Cucumber?  Better luck next time, Soul Eater.

Shirley, in her triumphant return, tried to be more logical.  She noted that all the answers share one character.  Could this be another one of the Wordsman’s famous tricks?  Or could she find the treat?  Well, she found a watermelon at E, and that’s not so bad.  Probably a lot better to eat than a pumpkin, actually, though if you take enough pain pills, maybe you could pretend it was both.  Halloween is a time for sweets, after all, and watermelon is pretty easily the sweetest thing on this list.  Her “Great Pumpkin,” however, is a bit of a letdown: F is the buttercup squash, which I may or may not have misread as “butternut squash” when I was making this quiz.  But they’re pretty much the same, right?

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, that one character that appears so many times means “melon,” so it’s used in the names of various melons and gourds.  Gourds are a kind of melon, right?  Or melons are a kind of gourd?  Tune in next week for the first edition of “Know Your Botany Terminology” (but not really).

A(nother) Fan had the last chance to get it right, but he ran up against an obstacle in that he chose to use a computer that was not set up to display East Asian characters.  But obstacles can be overcome.  Linus knows all about adversity, and so should we.  A(nother) Fan charged toward that wall, leapt over it, and ended up at B: the melon patch.  Well, at least he got close.  He may not have found the Great Pumpkin, but he at least got to the place where his buddy Linus waits for it every year.  Maybe if they wait long enough they can see the Red Baron.

C is the pumpkin, the “southern melon,” kabocha.  And A is actually a figure of speech meaning “two melons,” roughly equivalent to the American “as alike as two peas in a pod.”

But enough about fruits and vegetables.  Let’s get back to our characters.  Shirley should like this: we’re doing another challenge involving all the answers sharing a common element.  This time, instead of all the words sharing one kanji, I’m going to give you a list of kanji that all share a particular part.  Long-time contestants may recognize this common feature as meaning “moon,” so it should come as no surprise that the characters listed here refer to skin, existence, raising (as in raising a child), the color blue, agreement, clothing, friendship, and threatening/coercion.  Pick whichever one you feel has the most to do with the great yellow orb that hangs in the night sky.

And for those of you who might actually know one or two of these *cough*Theoman*cough*, let’s not forget to challenge ourselves.

A. 肯 B. 青 C. 服 D. 有

E. 朋 F. 育 G. 肌 H. 脅

Posted in Know Your Picture Characters | 4 Comments »

4 Responses

  1. TheomanZero Says:

    Well, E has the exact same radical twice. How could that be anything but agreement?

  2. Dragon Says:

    Did you know this is posted in Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Anyway:

    A – Coercion/threatening. See, the moon is clearly holding a gun over its head, though the fact that it’s holding it upside-down makes it slightly less threatening.

    B – Clothing, because that thing over the moon’s head in this case is obviously a sweet hat.

    C – Friendship, because it’s the moon standing next to his friend, who might be a footstool with a tail.

    D – Raising a child, because the moon is supporting that…other thing, which I guess is a child. It could also be a sweet hat, but it’s too late for that now.

    E – I’m going to AGREE with Theoman and say that this is AGREEMENT. Ha ha! See what I did there? We can’t possibly be wrong now!

    F – Blue. Because that thing on top of the moon looks like a bell, and…bluebell? It’s a flower?

    G – Skin, because that thing to the right of the moon is in roughly the shape of its outline, and is therefore clearly the moon’s discarded skin. I could have used similar reasoning to make it clothing, but that’s not nearly as creepy.

    H – Existence. Because, man, it sure does exist.

  3. Shirley Says:

    The only common feature has to be when 3 horizontal bars are joined by vertical lines on each side. But they are different in shape and size. The moon in its different phases? Best I can come up with here.

    But “the great yellow orb that hangs in the night sky”, as W.W. so poetically puts it, doesn’t seem to refer to much of anything in the list. But when a moon appears twice in one month, it is called a “blue” moon and E. has two of the same figure that means moon. So, E. is the color blue. It makes as least as much sense as most of my guesses.

  4. A(nother) Fan Says:

    Late again (although apparently not as late as the WW himself.

    Again, onthis computer, they all just show as empty squares, but I’ll go with C, because as empty squares go, it looks the most moon-ish.

Leave a Comment

Please note: Comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.