The Calligrapher — Ōuyáng Xún 欧阳询

Tang regular-script master whose 'Ouyang style' is a basic learning model.

Tang calligrapher (557–641), master of regular script/running script — Tang codifier of regular script; crisp, architectural strokes you could measure with a ruler. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

The Intrigues and the histories use gou for the public shame flung at a fallen man, the abuse shouted in the market, the disgrace that outlived the offense. The phrase gou bing, 'to be faulted by the world', marks a failure everyone agrees to name. The character joins words to a cry of contempt; to gou was to heap disgrace aloud, the verdict of the crowd when a reputation cracks in public.

Common words & phrases

• 诟骂 to revile · abuse
• 诟病 to criticize · blame · fault
• 耻诟 shame · disgrace

Read the story behind the character

A rival gou ma, reviles, a betrayer; a policy is gou bing, faulted, for its cost; a family bears the chi gou, the shame, of a scandal. The character lives in the language of blame, the shouted insult, the editorial's scorn. It names the moment a flaw is made everyone's property, the human appetite for pointing at the fallen, the old and unchanged grammar of disgrace when a name is dragged where all can see.

Why this character belongs on skin

Words can do what fists cannot: they enter the bone and stay. 诟 is speech turned venomous—revilement, shame flung like mud, the curse that outlives the quarrel by decades. The ancients knew its weight precisely. Han Xin, the great general, once crawled between a bully's legs rather than answer a taunt with a blade, and history reads his silence as wisdom, not weakness—he was saving himself for a war worth winning. Every warrior eventually learns the same arithmetic: disgrace is only permanent if you agree to carry it. The words land, but the meaning is negotiable. Some wear this character as armor, inked over the exact scar where the worst words landed years ago—a public declaration that the insult was absorbed, digested, and outlived, that the mud dried and flaked off. You are still standing. That is the entire argument, and it needs no rebuttal. Let the ink close the case.