Here’s another invidious comparison. Confucian poetics, unlike most of ours, deliberately chooses lexical anchors that can be readily translated to other languages (and cultures). This appears limiting since the deliberation is a constraint, for most of us. Nonetheless, the strategy presumes no professionally trained or hip readership needed to follow the broadly universal epistemology. (Historically the in-the-know or hip presumption gives meaning to specific tropes that are nonetheless encapsulated by the universal — hipness segregated within the hegemonic radius over the long run, clocking in with a short (2, 1, close to minus and counting) shelf life for tropes and their reception over time. The surface warrant to the comparison, perhaps: Overspecification evolves into ‘period’ samplers, accents of quaintness.