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Comment by dccoolgai | Hacker News Reader

I love how the East codifies aesthetics like this. My favorite is shibui which loosely translated (i'm told) means that every single detail of the object is simultaneously both useful and beautiful.

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It's mostly a Japanese thing. In Chinese we don't have a lot of words for particular aesthetic qualities. However, if you want profane homophonic puns or pithy four-word idioms ...

Is "pithy four-word idiom," in Chinese, a pithy four-word idiom?

Yes, if "四字成语" counts.

So it's not an idiom and the word "pithy" isn't in there, so it isn't quite as recursive as TLA.

Or maybe we had, but lost them in the history.

You probably lost those words when Qin Shi Huang decided to burn all the (non-legalist) books and bury all the scholars [1]...but there is always YinYang (also Taoism), which at least emphasizes contrasts. Let a hundred schools of thought flourish!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of...

Well Yin and Yang has more to do with philosophy than aesthetics and is used in martial arts and TCM rather than in design or art, so it doesn't really correspond.

Sort of weird to lump a whole region together. I'd agree though that traditional Japanese aesthetics include a lot of great descriptive terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics

Saw your first sentence coming. Just getting past read the generalization "East" in the parent comment and thinking "Oh, somebody is gonna finger point and get up in arms about it!", then I see your comment :)

Hm? Not up in arms, just politely noting an inaccuracy. It seemed unnecessary to pull out the Edward Said quotes.

Oh, I did not mean to describe your comment exactly as such. That was a polite and concise point-out by you. "Up-in-arms" was what I was expecting to come, not yours. I just found it amusing to immediately read your first sentence just as those thoughts were flowing in my head. Sorry for confusion.

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