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Old 15-09-2003, 04:12 PM
Jim Lewis
 
Posts: n/a
Default [IBC] "yamadori" boxwood


I think I even read somewhere -- and quite recently, too --

that
even the Japanese aren't kowtowing to the _exact_ meaning of
"yamadori" any more and use the term for a collected tree.

The
expanded usage makes sense for both here and there (and
particularly for boxwood ;-) which are mostly collected from

old
hedges, though I suppose the plant may still exist in the wild
somewhere in Asia. (Heck, they exist in the wild here --

having
escaped from old farmsteads to crop up in the north Florida
woods.)


snip

I did something on this for Bonsai Today On Line.


Prolly where I read it. ;-)


Yama means picked, dori means mountain. Since there are no

plants left in
the mountains usage of the word changed to mean collected from

the
wild. This is a usage known only in bonsai circles. So

anything ever
cultivated even allowed to grow wild is not yamadori by the

experts even
today. Yamadori now seems to mean styled by nature.

Any person learning Japanese as a second language or being born

here would
not get this meaning. Japanese has many subtle variations

known by various
classes of people. I worked at a company where I purchased

business cards
in English and Japanese for our 35 year old CEO. The Japanese

type setter
chose what he thought the proper title, but is also meant

honored
grandfather. After that we had a well bred very proper

educated Japanese
woman do all our title translations.

Kitsune Miko



Of course, then there's Humpty Dumpty . . . "When _I_ use a word,
it means just what I choose it to mean --neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you _can_ make words mean
so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master."

;-)

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - The phrase
'sustainable growth' is an oxymoron. - Stephen Viederman

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