I particularly like this word!
apart form the irony of which word it sounds like in English the character itself has elegance and its an excellent example of how a word can change meaning by semantic extension and shift.
Some one fluent in "Sino Japanese long ago referred some person of style as having PURE elegance and that I suspected is how the word came to change when used by educated Japanese and perhaps also people whose grasp of kanji and the differences between Japanese and Chinese wasnt quite as good as they thought?
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