Here’s your Chinese character (Hanzi) lesson for the day. I found this quite interesting.

Maybe you will, too?

The character written here is "dangran".  Due to cross-cultural miscommunication, there’s a moderately good chance I misunderstood the teacher’s meaning when she described the history of how this character developed, but I’m fairly certain I got it…

The teacher explained to us that the original meaning behind the character for dangran contained the following elements:

1. the symbol for a dog
2. the symbol for cooking / boiling
3. the symbol for an open fire

So essentially, dangran (at one point in Chinese history) meant: a dog boiling over an open fire.

What I find fascinating about this is that the modern meaning for dangran is translated: "Of course"

Of course we boil dog here.  Doesn’t everyone?  It wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes long to figure out why one might boil a dog.  And evidently, this fact was so common that linguistically it became a given!

On that note, I’m thinking I’d like to (puppy) chow down on a hot dog…  I wonder what the Chinese word for mustard is?