Kanji Disassembled #8: ‘Green’

Before I met my wife, when I was asked about “what is your favorite color?” I’d stared blankly at a point approximately an inch in front of my brow for a fraction of second before answering which of course, forgo the definition of a “favorite” in the first place. And my answer is always between black and blue. However, when I met my wife, one who is always observant in the latest fashion trend, and could talk at length about the difference between red and maroon, she quickly pointed out that green is actually my favorite color.

Now, even if as a non-distinct male I’ve rarely, if ever, wore anything out of the perfunctorily safe color boundaries (black, blue, white), I had begun to notice that for everything else, if given a choice, I would unconsciously picked out the green one. My carpet is green, my favorite jacket has a distinct green hue, my toothbrush is green, my towel is green, my choice of soap, shampoo, and tooth paste were also green and not only on the surface, mind you, even most of my numerous DVD cases has the color green. So, yeah, I guess green is my favorite color.

The above kanji is the kanji for “green” I obtained from dictionary under the word “green.” However, it should be noted that Japanese tend to use the word “aoi” which means “blue” to point the green vegetation (i.e. leaves, grass, etc.). During my brief stint with Japanese, I also found that it was quite rare that they actually used this kanji, or “midori” to denotes the color green. Don’t ask me why for I’m not a Japanese.

There are three symbols to this kanji, and from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, they are, “thread”, “broom”, and “rice grain.” Spend time enough with kanjis and the symbol for “thread” will come naturally you’d be hard pressed not to remember it. The way I see and remember it, though, is similar to the way it is written, which is slashed and wounded from top to bottom, almost resembling a multi-threaded rope. Almost, had I stretched my imagination thus far. And it does stretched thus far.

The “broom” symbol is a no-brainer really, though it looks like a mirrored latin “E” letter, I’d like to keep the meaning for this symbol. The “rice grain” was rather hard to spot, actually, and well, I had to rely on memory to spot this symbol. However, the “rice grain” here is extendable to “grains” in general and it helps me to came up with my own story.

I was generally clumsy when it comes to handle delicate things such as grain of coffee, or milk, or sugar. Generally, it could be said that one out of three times I made a coffee, I was ended up grabbing my broom and cleaning up the dust of grain I had spilled on my floor. So, there’s my story, “I’ve always spilled grain of coffee on the floor when I tried to made one, so I had to grab my soft threaded broom to clean up the mess.” And guess what color of my broom is? That’s right, it’s green.