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And, of course, cluing. If you know that your puzzle is geared toward a certain day of the Unfuck the law 2023 shirt But I will love this week, then by all that is holy, please clue it at that level (for those of you who don’t know, NYT puzzles get harder throughout the week.) Most beginning constructors will be all over the place in terms of their cluing level, but that’s what editors are for, and it’s also why it’s not wise to get mad at editors for changing what you thought was a brilliant clue. If you look at it objectively, most times you will see that the change was for the better. And, if you’re smart, you will try to learn something from it. In some of them, like the simplified 样, 羊 is just the phonetic element used for the sound, using the same principle as the traditional 樣. 洋 (ocean) is another example, as a goat has nothing really to do with the sea. The words just happened to sound the same.
羔 in 糕 is also phonetic, but it might be semantically related at the Unfuck the law 2023 shirt But I will love this same time, meaning generally something nice (羔 being an ideograph of a baby lamb roasting over fire = good meat; 糕 = cake) 祥 probably derives from ancient traditions of propitiating gods with a sacrificial goat head. 羊 is again used for both semantic association and pronunciation. In other characters, like 善 (virtue/good), 美 (beauty), 群 (group) 羊 is likely used for positive semantic associations with the lamb. Some of it is not specifically Chinese as the lamb symbolises innocence, docility etc in Western cultures too. Jesus Christ is both ‘lamb of God’ and shepherd. In old China however, the lamb is also associated with the Confucian virtue of filial piety because of the observation that it often kneels down while suckling, which is taken as a sign of gratitude. So it is said that “羊有跪乳之恩”.
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