Buried Ideas.

some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth

There were always people with disruptive ideas, which were rightly laid to rest by tradition. It’s no use going back in history to find dissenters. What matters is that their voices disappeared from the record.

even knowing it comes out OK in the end, my heart was in my mouth reading about the strips “developing black spots—fungus that within a day could eat a hole through the bamboo”

You should have heard about the Shuanggudui strips.
They already weren’t preserved as well as some of the others, but then they got excavated during a rainstorm, the chamber they were in had to be pumped, and apparently some of the fragments were in the pumped water. And I think there were some later complications involved (not sure of the details).
It is said that it was a miracle that anything was recovered from these texts (admittedly, they in any case postdated the Qin dynasty, but they would still have been important early sources had they survived better).

I recently read, in a book about the decipherment of Linear B (can’t recall the book title), that a few of the Linear B tablets were left outside overnight directly after excavation – and destroyed by a sudden rain, before the text could have been copied. Another sad story about the loss of history.

Yes, but virtue in the Latin/Italian sense, meaning ‘inner strength, power’. Using virtue to translate 德 dé nowadays is extremely misleading; we still talk of the virtue of a drug, but the virtue of a person means something completely different. So yes, Way Power Classic, or The Way And Its Power.

You are also conflating the 诗经 Shījīng, or Book of Odes/Poems, with the 易经 Yìjīng, or Book of Changes.

The route you can traverse
  isn’t a static route.
The name you can dereference
  isn’t a universal name.

Namelessness is the root of everything.
Names are the mother of everything.

Therefore,
  the unchanging, seen from outside the box,
    reveals its inner nature;
  the unchanging, seen from inside the box,
    reveals its outer form.

These two are alike in origin,
  but different in name.
Their unity is called “the mystery”.

Mystery of all mysteries,
  the gate to all wonders.

—Unix Power Classic 1

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/error-haiku.html

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao, until
You bring fresh toner.

I used to be very pedantic about pointing out to people that it’s “UNIX” (although the fault, in this case, is not in John’s self, but in his stars… I mean, his source).

My source is not myself:

Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately ‘UNIX’ or ‘Unix’; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the ‘UNIX’ spelling originally happened in CACM’s 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System because “we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps.” Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to ‘Unix’ in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) “wimped out” on the issue. So, while the trademark today is ‘UNIX’, both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses ‘Unix’ in deference to dmr’s wishes.

As we quip in Dutch, “UNIX, Unix, Unox; het zal me een worst wezen.”

The purpose of the sossage is unclear:

Literally “that would be sausage to me”, this expression is used to say that you couldn’t care less about something. Note that you cannot use it to say that you don’t care about somebody.

Note that Unox is the major local brand of frankfurters and such.

I didn’t know that das ist mir Wurs(ch)t was so widespread!

That’s even more flabbergasting than Antoine Fabre d’Olivet’s translation of Genesis:

Less, actually. It’s just an attempt to be brutally literal – without secondarily expanding it into contingent-potentialities-in-a-potentiality-of-being.

While I don’t understand “lodehead”, I was taught dào kě dào fēi cháng dào as “[the] Dào [you] can [call] Dào [is] not [the long > ] eternal Dào” – omit needless!

We used to calque what could be calqued from German, but here we have Det er ett fett (for meg), literally “that is one fat for me”. I’ve imagined it’s from something to do with making sausages, though.

“Lodehead” seems to be based on an analysis of the character 道 (“Way”) into its components: 辶 (“path,” rendered using “lode” in an archaic sense) + 首 (“head”) = 道 (“lodehead”). “Minikin-subliminaria” for 妙 (“mystery/wonder”) and “circuit-luminaria” for 徼 (“boundary”) are apparently based on similar analyses.

Oh, character etymology. *grumble*

What, you don’t want to pay $28.01?

It was a fiver new! *weeps gentle but unmistakably bitter tears*

I am willing to make allowances as to how it isn’t 1985 anymore, but your everyday Bloodaxe/Carcanet/Faber book of pomes goes for a tenner or so, which is less painful. (And you can get a bulk deal on shippings from actual retail outlets.)

Boodberg’s translation of the beginning of the Daodejing is from his paper “Philological Notes on Chapter One of The Lao Tzu”, published in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, December 1957. It’s available here if you have JSTOR access. If you don’t have JSTOR access you can get a MyJSTOR account and add it to your shelf.

His discussion of the first character of the first stichos, “道”, begins:

S 1.1 The etymological background of Tao 道 is usually dismissed by scholars fascinated by its exalted metaphysical status with a brief twofold statement: that the primary and concrete meaning of the word tao < d‘ôg is “way,” “path” (“la voie,” “der Weg,” “via”) and that its graph is a compound of two graphic elements, “head,” shou < śjôg, used as a phonetic, and the semantic “to proceed,” “walk.” Though essentially correct, the statement is in need of amplification and closer philological scrutiny. In ancient scriptions of the graph, “proceed” (classifier 162) interchanges with 行 “march in order,” “act” (classifier 144) and occasionally the two classifiers are telescoped together. Shuo Wen 2B offers as a ku wen form of tao a diagram of “head” and 寸, modern classifer 041 ts‘un, “inch,” but anciently an allogram of 手 shou < śjôg, “hand.” Some Bronze scriptions have this fork-like “hand” element added to tao with C144, while in a few of them the “hand” appears to emerge as a graphic modification of the lower “footstep” element (modern 止, C077) in the telescoped C162 + C144. This “tao with the hand element” is usually identified with the modern character 導 tao < d‘ôg, “to lead,” “guide,” “conduct,” and considered to be a derivative or verbal cognate of the noun tao, “way,” “path.” The evidence just summarized would indicate rather that “tao with the hand” is but a variant of the basic tao and that the word itself combined both nominal and verbal aspects of the etymon. This is supported by textual examples of the use of the primary tao in the verbal sense “to lead” (e.g. Analects 1.5; 2.3) and seriously undermines the unspoken assumption implied in the common translation of Tao as “way” that the concept is essentially a nominal one. Tao would seem, then, to be etymologically a more dynamic concept than we have made it translation-wise. It would be more appropriately rendered by “leadway” and “lode” (“way,” “course,” “journey,” “leading,” “guidance”; cf. “lodestone” and “lodestar”), the somewhat obsolescent deverbal noun from “to lead.”

Another etymological problem concerns the element “head” in tao. Shou < śjôg is undoubtedly phonetic in tao < d‘ôg (the alternation of spirant and stop being common in a given phonetic series), but is it merely phonetic or etymonic? Semasiological analogy (English: “to head” meaning “to lead” and “to tend in a certain direction,” “head,” “headway”) would suggest that the latter is the case; Chinese synonymy seems to confirm it. Of the three common aspects of HEAD, topmost protruberance (caput), uppermost turning point (vertex), and tip (apex), shou favors the first two, the last being expressed by 顚 tien and 頂 ting. Shou as “vertex” is well attested in verbal function (it is then read in the fourth tone) as “to turn to,” “to obvert.” Besides “leadway” and “lode,” tao would then also connote “headway,” and perhaps “headlead,” “headlode,” and “lodehead.” With shou commonly meaning “foremost,” “chief,” “arch-,” we are perilously near seeing in it an equivalent of Gr. archēgos, archēgon, “first cause,” “archegetic (leading, primary) principle.”

Discussion of the word continues for another couple pages, growing increasingly difficult for me to follow, but not directly bearing on the choice of “lodehead”.

At the conclusion, which can also be read here, Boodberg describes his objective in translation:

The following translation of the entire text [of the first chapter] has little literary merit. It reflects, however, to the best of my ability, every significant etymological and grammatical feature, including every double entendre, that I have been able to discover in the original in an endeavor to establish a solider philological foundation upon which a firmer interpretation of the incipit of Taoist philosophy might be built.

… tant pis.

“certainly a nut, but a nut with high principles and deep learning.”

No one could ask for a finer epitaph.