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THE WAY OF KICKING AND PUNCHING

1/6/2019

2 Comments

 
It's been spelled Taekwondo, Taekwon-Do, Tae Kwon Do, and TaeKwon Do, but, essentially, the word for the martial art boils down to three parts in the original Korean: tae, meaning "to kick" or otherwise cause damage with your foot, gwon, meaning "to punch", and do, meaning "the way". Together, this is interpreted as meaning "the way of kicking and punching". Asian etymologies are really hard for me to do, because they combine parts of characters and can't really be traced the way English ones can, so I won't comment further on something I don't know much about. However, let's talk about form. Of all the capitalizations and spellings since the word's introduction in the 1960s, the different capitalizations of taekwondo and Taekwondo are about tied for usages, in both literature and Google searches. The other terms exist but are less frequent.
2 Comments
Thomas Ottaway
1/9/2019 01:52:39 am

Related: "do" also means the way in Japanese as in judo which roughly translates to gentle way.

This is the same character as the Chinese word "dao" 道 of the same meaning. This character is used in the word for daoism.

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Adam Aleksic link
1/11/2019 10:33:31 am

Thanks Thomas! Glad you're still reading my blog

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law. 
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