ИСТИНА

The 藏詞 ‘hidden words’ calembour implies leaving out one or more components from idiomatic units or quotations from famous essays or poems. Originally employed by Cáo Pī, Pān Yuè, and Táo Yuānmíng, this type of language conundrum flourished during the Táng-Sòng era and developed into the 藏頭 ‘hidden-head’, 藏腰 ‘hidden-middle’, and 縮腳 ‘shortened’, or 歇後 ‘omitted-tail’ forms, with the communicative value encoded in the “footprints” of their missing components. The ‘hidden-head’ form can be expressed via direct (e.g., Dù Fǔ uses the expression 昭回 ‘shining and revolving’ as a substitution for 雲漢, lit. ‘milky way’, which derives from the line of Ode 258 of the Shījīng) or reversed (as 厥修 ‘their cultivating […]’ < 修厥德 ‘cultivating their virtue’ in the Tángyǔlín) substitutions, or via allusions. The ‘hidden-middle’ form occurs in the poem by Hán Yù (where 居諸 substitutes 日月 and is crystallised from the Shījīng’s 日居月諸, lit. “O, sun, o moon!”) and Gōng Zìzhēn (where 去日多 substitutes 苦 ‘sufferings’ and derives from Caó Cāo’s “Short Song”). The most frequently employed ‘omitted-tail’ type (e.g., 三尺 ‘a three-chǐ’, 一抔 ‘a handful’) inspired the consequent development of ‘omitted-tail’ poems and the sayings back then referred to as 歇後語 ‘tailless puns’. All these truncated precedent phenomena should not be confused with metonymy, on one side, and with ellipsis, aposiopesis or prosiopesis, on the other.