On the Fashion of Clinging Stubbornly to Structure Names (Shi Shuo Ju Ni Ge Ju)

Seven Cases of Reading the Label Instead of the Chart

The useful god rests on the month; outer structures are a fallback, not a first choice. Shen's complaint here is that readers invert that order — and he proves it with seven short cases, each of which has a perfectly good plain structure that gets ignored in favour of a grander name: 'single food', 'the day's seat returning to the hour', 'oblique officer in the hour', 'punishment-combination', 'embracing xu', 'filling in the embraced nobleman', 'the rat nobleman'.