The motto "Hand talk" for Go gets little shrift any more, probably because people have forgotten that Go is a human activity. I like the style of the last Meijin game. It is as if the players snapped out of some sort of spell and returned to real life.
Excellently put!
The reference to hand talk and spells reminds me of the 9th century poem by Sugawara Michizane, "On Watching Wang Du Play Go"
一死一生爭道頻
手談壓卻口談人
殷勤不愧相嘲弄
漫說當家有積薪
Wang Du was a visiting professor, in Japan to give Confucian lectures to the Emperor. Michizane was Japan's foremost scholar. They obviously got on well and could chaff each other. The game, he says, is less about hand talk (手談) then a war of words with pouting lips. Yet, here is a descendant of Wang the Woodcutter (積薪)! Wang Jixin of course features in one of Chinese go's most famous fantasy stories.
We could even combine everything and do hand talk in Harry Potter spells. The spell "accio" seems appropriate: 飞来！ (飞 being Chinese for a knight's move). Silencio 无声无息! has to be in the frame somewhere, of course, but if we need a bit of chaffing, how about the levitations spell 羽加迪姆 勒维奥萨！(wingardium leviosa): "you're getting a bit above yourself!" The full body paralysis curse 统统石化 is perhaps going too far, as turning uour opponent to stone may actually give him an advantage in go. I imagine that in practice most go talk would simply end with Expelliarmus 除你武器！(or if you win big maybe you can change
chu ni wuqi to
chu ni weiqi).
They didn't have go forums in those days. They wrote poems to each other instead. Dumbing down started a loooong time ago.
(You can tell I'm quasi-bored in quasi-lockdown
)
