On Mon, 07 Jun 2004 01:19:54 GMT, "JD" wrote:

I may be wrong, but it doesn't appear that there is any play on words going
on here.

All Japanese etymology is a play on words. Every character has a
shedload of meanings. Every word is only a couple of characters.
There's huge duplication and potential ambiguity here.

The creation of a "beautiful" word (which is the wrong term, but there
is an aesthetic notion here) is in picking something that has several
meanings, made by reading the same characters in different ways and
having many or all of the meanings relevant to the concept expressed
by the overall word.

--
Smert' spamionam