Hanzi of the day! 取

Hey everybody! Today, as the world is reopening, most of us are going to roam through the mythical battlefields known as outside world in order to pursue arbitrary quests called life goals.
This is the purrfect opportunity to go through history in order to look at the curious case of the character 取.

取 qǔ is an ideogrammic compound character that means to take. It is formed of the character for ear 耳 on the left and the character for again 又 on the right. This makes no sense, right?

Wrong

For starters, the character 又 is a snake that wiggled and changed its meaning. It used to represent the right hand. In ancient times there was a practise to cut and collect the ears of dead enemy soldiers on the battlefield in order to later show them as evidence for a kill. So the actual meaning of 取 is a right hand taking someone's ear away.

Now that we have solved this mystery, let's look at the curiously related character for marriage. When a man marries a woman, that is 娶 qǔ, literally to take 取 a woman 女.

This is not be confused for the word for a woman marrying a man, which is, obviously 嫁 , or a woman 女 finding a house 家. The traidition in ancient times dictated that the woman goes to the groom's house when married.

That's it from me. Enjoy life, guys!

Nick