Lions and tigers and bos

[muckefuck]

I made a special trip to the basement supposedly to search for some long-lost volumes, but really more to consult the Ci2hai3 (literally, "word sea") for information on an obscure character (so obscure that we had to substitute a near-homonym in order to get it to print out) I used in a name that I created for a friend. My trusty Taiwanese dictionary defines it only as "a kind of fierce animal". It's written with the "horse" radical, so I figured it must be somehow horselike. Sure enough, the Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海經, a 3rd cent. B.C.E. compilation of legend and myth, geographically organised) confirms that it has "a form like a horse, white body, black tail, one horn, a tiger's teeth and claws; it makes a sound like a drum and eats tigers and panthers." Well, that clears things up! An earlier work whose title I didn't recognise tells us only that the bo2 is "like a horse [with] slightly bent teeth [that] eats tiger and panthers."

It forms the second part of the moniker; the first is a verb meaning "rub" with extended meanings of "massage", "tease", and "subdue". I plan to give the precieux translation "one who soothes the savage beast...by rubbing" to much merriment and chagrin.