Andy Dingley wrote...

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.

That was my guarded suspicion, but being completely ignorant of Japanese,
I have no way of knowing at this point. Do you know whether the
characters for "High Class Cutlery" and "White Paper Steel" (for example)
bear any semblence to each other? Or, is it just a coincidence that the
phonetic translations jive in English?

Jim

P.S. I confess that I was hoping you would comment on the conjectures in
my response to CW's post yesterday, Andy. I thought you might have some
insight into the chemistry/performance relationship of these products
that you could share.

Cheers!

Jim