Why was there fire in ancient times?

"Walking with water" is a taboo word for "fire". In ancient China, we were often afraid to talk about death, evil diseases and disasters. If you don't say fire, it's called "running water."

Verbal taboos reflect people's ideological tendency to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages, and also show respect for others, which is reasonable. Therefore, a large number of substitute words have been handed down, which not only enriched Chinese vocabulary, but also became an important part of etiquette and custom culture.

For example, the word "pheasant" was originally a pheasant, but it was named pheasant because of Lv Hou, the wife of Emperor Gaozu Liu Bang. She is Hui Di's mother. After Hui Di's death, Lv Hou inherited the title of imperial court and ruled for eight years. In order to show her dignity, people are not allowed to call her by her first name, or even use words with the same pronunciation as her name, so when people have to say "pheasant", they have to call it pheasant instead.

Another way to avoid information inflation is to replace it with words with different pronunciations but the same meaning. This is the case when people in the Qin Dynasty called the "first month" the "end of the month". ("End" is the beginning. )

Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty surnamed Liu, a famous car. In order to avoid the taboo of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, people in the Han Dynasty changed the word "Che" to "Tonghou" and renamed "Kuaiche" to "Kuaitong".

In order to avoid taboo, Li Shimin of Emperor Taizong changed the word "people" to "people", and Liu Zongyuan changed "folk customs" to "folk customs" in "Snake Catching". When reading today, you have to read your notes to understand.

"Lack of pen" and "lack of text" is another way to avoid. The so-called "lack of pens" means that when you want to write, you should write fewer strokes. Lin Daiyu always lacks a pen to write the word "people".

The so-called "lack of text" means not writing spaces. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, Xiao Yan's father's name in Liang Wudi was Shunzhi, so the word Shunzhi in the Book of Southern Qi written by Xiao Zixian, a native of A Liang, was blank.