False Positive

I woke this morning to a chat from Aftab, wondering whether I had yet seen this. A brief racing of the heart: Could it be? After all this time? After attending so many talks that started with "We tried to prove such and such" and ended with "We found that it's equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis"? But I know where to check, so the excitement was short lived.

Meanwhile, on my way in to the office today, I recognized for the first time a tattooed Chinese (or Japanese) character. Now that I'm learning Chinese, I always look to see if I know the characters people have tattooed on themselves, but until now I hadn't seen any that I actually know. This isn't so surprising, as the Chinese we learn tends to be practical, and people are unlikely to tattoo "fried rice" or "taxicab" on themselves.

The tattoo in question was on a girl's arm and the character was 生. I'm told that in Japanese this has 8 billion pronunciations and meanings. In Chinese, I know it as "shēng", meaning "to be born; to give birth; life; to grow". It's possible that it was preceded by another character or other characters, covered by her sleeve, giving a more particular meaning (possibly something one is more likely to tattoo upon oneself). The only thing I could think of offhand was 出生，"chū shēng", "to be born", but that seems unlikely. Searching by pinyin, my dictionary also just turned up 畜生, "chù sheng", "domestic animal", which seems even less likely. We learn 生 early on, as part of 生日, "shēng rì", which means "birthday" (日 is "day" or "sun").