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i was puzzled as to what the etymology of the japanese word 蜃気楼 (shinkirō, meaning “mirage”) could be. why did it begin with 蜃 which supposedly means “clam” but doesn't appear in other words?
it turns out that 蜃 in chinese mythology is a clam monster that creates mirages!
cultural associations make for strange words. the relationship between clams and mirages totally threw me, because i simply didn't know about the shen (蜃)
@hikari sometimes I think about how rhyming brings arbitrary words into association and the set of such associations is different over every language
@0xabad1dea @hikari what really messes with me is in Shakespeare. When there's a joke or a couplet at the end of a speech, where it's really obvious that the idea is those two words are supposed to rhyme. But they don't. Anymore.