Or, “The Horror of Kanji,” in which our heroine learns that disgust can be a legitimate memorization technique.
The offending kanji: 腺
腺 (sen), gland
This popped up in my random online flashcard program one day in April. I like to look at the radicals of unknown kanji to guess at the meaning, and so I thought, “Moon 月-fountain 泉! How romantic! This will surely get added to my collection of beautiful kanji!” (Kanji will not be italicized from here.)
I have a very distinct memory of one of my bilingual former bosses showing me this mammoth kanji dictionary and pointing out that the radical for moon and the radical for meat were slightly different but very similar. I consulted my Henshall kanji dictionary for this post, and the radical appears to have been consolidated into one. So while 月 alone means moon, in combination with other radicals it can represent the moon, like in 朝, morning, OR meat, as in 腹, stomach.
I click to flip over the card, and the meaning is gland, as in 前立腺 (prostate gland; literally the “front-standing-gland”) or 甲状腺 (thryoid, the “helmet-shape-gland”).
So, it’s not moon-fountain, but meat-fountain.
Meat Fountain.
I am cringing just writing that out.
You can stick anything on front to describe the gland, though, which I like. Lachrymal gland is 涙腺 (ruisen, tear + gland); mammary gland is 乳腺 (nyuusen; milk + gland); an alternate term for the bubonic plague is 腺ペスト (sen pesuto), a pestilence of the glands. (The other term is 黒死病, kokushibyou, literally The Black Death Disease.) So, all in all, a very useful and easy-to-combine kanji.
Meat fountain.
And now you will never forget it either.
Addendum
As I am writing this, I have realized why the Japanese call pesto, the delicious green sauce made of basil, garlic, and pine nuts, by part of its Italian name, ジェノヴェーゼ (Jenoviize) from pesto Genovese.
The reason? Pesuto ペスト, as previously mentioned, is their term for the plague. It comes from the French word for plague, peste. (source: Jim Breen).
I was aware the usage of ジェノヴェーゼ ever since a friend and I had to decipher an katakanaized Italian menu in Tokyo, but I had continued to refer to my pesto as pesuto. I wonder what exactly my coworkers think I like to eat on my spaghetti.
The Lobster Dance 
I did not know that about the meat radical. That makes a lot more sense now. “Meat fountain” is a gross concept; thanks for the imagery. But at least it helps explain a lot of things – like 腹 and 肌。 I wonder if 胎 is supposed to be “meat platform” (wow.) or “moon platform.” I think the latter is much more poetic – like how a woman’s pregnant belly can be round like the moon.
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If you take 腺 as “a fountain in the flesh” that’s somewhat less gross (and more like what a gland is), but still. Unlike 胎, we can’t really choose to interpret it both ways. (Good way to remember 胎, though, as round like the moon.)
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Ditto toranosuke’s comment. I always wondered why the kanji for body parts pretty much all had the radical for moon in them!
Also, the proximity of “front-standing-gland” and “helmet-shaped-gland” made my mind think of a samurai gland dutifully lining up to 出陣 while glands clad in the white aprons of the Women’s National Defense Association wished for their victory. ^o^;;;;
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It’s the weirdest thing–my old boss must have had the monster book of kanji or something. I never forgot it, but my kanji books are not so extensive.
I would prefer my glands NOT to march off to war, but that’s pretty funny. 😉
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