Chinese Worms

I am a proud member of the Chinese diapora, born and bred in Singapore. My upbringing means I’ve lost quite a lot of my Chinese roots (since English is more native to me than Chinese), but have kept enough alive so that I can still identify myself as one (I must thank my father for that – he was very insistent on this part of my identify in my youth).

One of my great interests is Linguistics, and Chinese characters is one part of this area that I like to investigate. In Chinese, a worm is represented by this character (Chinese characters are all either pictographs or ideographs) 虫. The ancient original pictograph looked like a snake, and was actually used to refer to a snake, rather than a worm. Today, the Chinese for snake is 蛇. You should be able to see the worm pictograph within the character for snake (it’s at the left).

Chinese characters are basically ideographs, and contain the ideas within the character. This worm pictograph is not only found in snakes. Frogs 青蛙, mosquitoes 蚊子, flies 苍蝇 and lizards 蜥蜴 all have the worm pictograph. In other words, to the Chinese thinking, 虫 is not necessarily just a worm. It refers to all kinds of insects and creatures that crawls!

So, when a Chinese tells you that you’re a lazy worm 懒虫, it can be very insulting indeed.