昔
← →
once upon a time
On-Yomi: セキ、シャク — Kun-Yomi: むかし
Elements:
once upon a time, salad, flowers, one, floor, sun, day
Primitive:
salad The element for flowers joins with the long horizontal stroke beneath it to create the picture of a bowl of salad. [4]
Heisig story:
Salad . . . days. This is the character with which Japanese fairytales commonly begin.
Koohii stories:
1) [the_marshal] 30-4-2006(209): Once upon a time, the children were forced to eat their salad every day.
2) [andye] 11-1-2007(147): For those who don't know the expression, "salad days" means the time of one's youth. (originally from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_days). I suspect Heisig chose "salad" as the name for the radical just for this phrase…
3) [ayoung24] 20-10-2007(107): Once upon a time there was a McDonald's salad and it was left out in the sun for a whole day. But … nothing happened because it was a McDonald's salad, chock full of preservatives and other garbage. The salad lived happily ever after (and so did the person who didn't eat it). The end. [I didn't write this… the original author deleted it… but it's my favourite story on the whole site.].
4) [chamcham] 31-1-2010(19): This is the kanji for "mukashi". Often used for "once upon a time" or "long time ago". I will take this kanji to mean "really fucking long time ago"……A really fucking long time ago, I use to eat salad every day and was very slim…..those days are long gone and I'm now fat as a pig…
5) [Hujis] 2-3-2009(8): Once upon a time there was a ruler called ceaser (shiza sarada). He ruled everything under the sun, even the sun worshiping egyptians, until one day he was killed and then his sun Augustous took over. I think Ceaser will be an easier primitive than once upon a time. N.B. It's worked really well for me over the next couple of kanji.