Today's Kanji Revision: Odoroku

The Japanese character used in the word "surprise", 'odoroku', contains the character for 'horse'.

Here are the two, side by side, surprise on the left, horse on the right:



Now, you can see that horse is the bottom half of surprise. You can also see that it's a heck of a lot of work to write 'surprise'- 22 different strokes of the pen, to be precise, and that's simply too much work.

If you look at horse, it appears to have four legs on the bottom, just like a real horse does.

Today's work-saving revision is simple. We'll get rid of the old character for 'surprise', and replace it with a modified 'horse'- and we'll just write two legs underneath it...

wouldn't you be surprised by a horse with two legs?

Something like this: