The Chase Is On: Part 1 of 3
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
| Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary |
The other day, I encountered 追 (TSUI, o(u)) in three different contexts: during a Skype-chat with a Japanese friend, on a random visit to a website, and in a dictionary as I searched for something else. In all cases, this kanji appeared in words I didn’t know: 追加 (tsuika: addition), 追う (ou: to chase), and 貝殻追放 (kaigara tsuihō: ostracism).
I took it as a sign that the kanji gods wanted me to fall in love with 追—or at least investigate it. I have done their bidding and will look at this character in the next three blogs.
I’m not sure I’m in love with 追. After all, it breaks down as “moving buttocks”—not the most charming of ingredients! But I’m intrigued, partly because 追 contains opposite meanings:
1. to chase after, to pursue
2. to chase away, to drive (cattle), to shoo (flies)
Last week we saw another kanji with similar schizophrenia—出る (deru) can mean both “to leave” and “to appear.”
Everything Contains Its Opposite …
These characters actually combine in 追い出す (oidasu: to chase away, to kick out, to chase away + to thrust out), although in this case the intransitive 出る has changed to the transitive form 出す (dasu), which can mean “to thrust out.” When these two on-the-fence characters merge in a word, they lose all their wishy-washiness and convey a decisive message: Get out!
Whereas 出 contains only a physical tension (i.e., coming versus going), 追 can also have an emotional tension. That is, you can pursue someone while yelling, “Hit the road! Don’t ever come back!” Although 追 looks fairly compact, it therefore contains quite a bundle of energies moving in opposite directions. Let’s look at each of these contradictory meanings.
Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity | 3 Comments »
