At the root of Yggdrasill, the Tree of Life, lies the magical Source of Urd. There dwell the three Norns: Urd (Wyrd), Verdandi and Skuld. Now, Urd is old Norse for 'fate'. It has become the root wert-'='to turn' to mean anything prone to change. The word 'weather' (='weer' in Dutch) originating from this, the same holds for the Dutch verb 'worden' (='to become') and also the word 'versus' ('turned against'). Because of the connotations with changing behaviour, it is easy to understand that the name Wyrd has developed into 'weird', strange and unpredicted.
This in itself is an interesting piece of etymology. But the story gets better. Last week I received a small gift from Oshita sensei. He passed this eighth dan exam iaido last year. He gave me a tenugui, a small towel, that was made for the occasion. It has a nicely calligraphed text on it. The calligaphy reads fudoshin, which normally is translated as 'an unmovable mind.'
The first and the last characters are very common: 'heart'/'mind' and 'not'/'no'. The middle one I had seen before, but I had forgotten its meaning. I used my Chinese/Japanese program Wakan and found out that the middle character means 'move, motion, change, confusion, shift, shake'. Thus, the calligraphy reads (as I translate it) something like 'a mind without confusion'.
In this way I found out that also in the Far East the bond between 'change' and 'confusion' is anchored in vocabulary.
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