Tso see line 123. [Père Zottoli here adopts a singular idiom, namely "chronicorum liber exurgit." If he employs "exurgit" (exsurgit for preference) to avoid the use of a passive, he misses a good chance of illustrating the powers of Chinese words, which readily lend themselves to any voice, mood, or tense, as required. For
two interpolated lines see Appendix II.]
| 161. | 寓 | 褒 | 貶 | These Annals contain praise and blame, | |
| Yü4 | pao1 | pien3 | |||
| Dwell | praise | blame |
Yü is composed of 宀 mien shelter as radical, with a common phonetic. It originally meant to sojourn, to be present in, and comes by extension to mean allegory, but Eitel is quite wrong in giving it here such an extended meaning as "Which, being metaphorically suggestive of either praise or censure."
Pao is now composed of 保 pao to guarantee as phonetic, with 衣 i clothes as radical (line 82). K'ang Hsi gives a different combination as the classical form, but the Shuo Wên gives another; in fact there are several ways of writing this character, of which the one adopted is the most common. It originally meant long robes, and these, conferred by the sovereign, may have come to embody the idea of praise.
Pien has 貝 pei pearl-oyster, valuables, as radical, with 乏 fa exhausted (said to be 正 chêng upright turned the wrong way round) as phonetic. It originally meant to injure. [This is the famous "praise-and-blame" theory, based upon the following words of Mencius, "Confucius completed the Spring and Autumn Annals, and rebellious Ministers and bad sons stood aghast." Hence it came to be said that "one word of such praise was more honourable than an embroidered robe, and one word of such censure sharper than an axe."]
