Fresh

A couple of friends got curious about the character xian1.

鮮

This is a compound character, with "fish" on the left and "sheep" on the right.

After a couple of months of debate, and still more debate, here are my two cents.

Here's what the 古漢語常用字字典 (Commonly used classical dictionary) 4th editions says.

pg.413:

1) Fish. Live fish. Laozi: "Governing a big country is like braising a fish." E.g. Fresh, newly killed after entrapping it. Mu sheng in "Qi Fa": "Fresh coy of the skinny fish kind" . E.g. Fresh blood-red, fresh and shiny. Li Bai in "Midnight Wu Song": Red makeup and a fresh day.

2) Premature death, early death. "Zuozhaun.Gao gong 5 years": The freshly buried person is from the western gate."

3) xian3 (possible pun) for 顯， less. "Zuozhuan Dinggong 13 years": The rich who do not ride a horse are rare (鮮)。

4） xian4 (ANOTHER possible pun for) 獻， to pay tribute.

Another source:

http://data.book.hexun.com.tw/chapter-368-12-21.shtml

This websiite gives three different interpretations of the "fresh" based on 3 seperate thoughts from classical text.

1) The first group from the oldest text, the Jinwen, associates this word with鱻. If you put this in word and zoom in, it's 3 fishes! So the sheep on the right should represent the number 3, or 三。

2) The second group thinks that this character represents a species of fish in northern China. Since there's little water, fish was very rare. These were a grassland people, and thought lamb was fresh. But on the off chance that they did eat fish, it tasted "fresher". So this character would be the extreme form of describing the essence of fish. Kinda like "rare fresh."

3) A third group believes that northerners think sheep are fresh. And southerners think fish are fresh. Combining the two would mean something like, "double fresh."

Fresh aint easy. I vote for number 2.