This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
尤
In brief: going too far is as bad as falling short
Common reading
Phono-semantic. The small-seal form is from 乙 with 又 as the sound; 乙 depicts a plant growing crookedly, which shows its excellence when obstructed. Original sense: most excellent. Shuowen: “尤 means different.” Xiao Erya: “尤 means strange.” The bronze form is from 又 with a small stroke, depicting a growth on the hand: 尤 is the early form of 肬 or 疣, originally a wart or lump. A wart is a superfluous growth, an abnormal peculiarity, so it extends to faults and offences. From the lump it extends to standing out, excellence; from peculiarity, to especially, particularly: Ouyang Xiu, “The Old Drunkard’s Pavilion”: “Its peaks to the south-west, its woods and valleys, are especially (尤) beautiful.”
Design reading
尤 is often used with a slightly negative sense, as in “a bewitching beauty (尤物) leads people astray”, “blaming heaven and others (怨天尤人)”, “the most shameless of all (无耻之尤)”. The horizontal crossing the left-falling stroke shows showing oneself outward, and also having deviated from one’s own Fa; the vertical-bend-hook shows the need to correct oneself and rise through cultivation; the dot at the upper right shows that the negative meaning of the form is to be chosen. Chinese tradition values the mean: nothing should be overdone; one step beyond the truth is error. Those who rely on their own abilities often make a mess of things, so 尤 means both “outstanding” and “going too far is as bad as falling short”.
About this entry
This entry is taken from the edited manuscript of LI Xutong’s Exploring the Design Mysteries of Chinese Characters. The common reading follows traditional philology, the Shuowen Jiezi and other classics, and modern dictionaries; the design reading recovers the rationale of the character’s formation from the meanings of its strokes, the pairing of yin and yang, and the nine-palace layout, following the New Six Scripts. The premise of the design reading, that the generative mechanism of Chinese characters was designed, is an axiom of this system and differs from the evolutionary account usual in philology; the two readings are kept apart, as surface and depth.