I have puzzled over, and been intrigued by, something a Chinese friend in Beijing friend wrote a long time ago, when she was describing a tagline she’d come up with for our encyclopedia business. She said the last character had the “implication” of water–and thus of abundance. An appropriate meaning, she said, for a company tagline. (She worked at a big Internet company so she understood these things.)

I understood that that extra meaning came from the character’s being similar to, and sounding like, the one for water. But a book I read recently, Foreign Babes in Beijing, explained how a Chinese word could have multiple layers in terms of an example in English, ‘telecharge.’ The author points out that to understand, or guess at, the meaning you need to know the words it comes from. ‘Telephone,’ probably, and ‘charge’ (card). Telecharge probably means making a credit card payment over the telephone. And for an English speaker, interpreting that is easy, even unconscious. It’d be great to know if Chinese speakers and scholars would agree with that comparison, and give us some examples.