Zhongwen? That's a Terrible Space Cowboy Name!

by Ian Tullis
Answer: DRAGONFLY

The setting here is the TV show Firefly, in which the characters speak a hybrid of Chinese and English. Each italicized word is a translation of a single common Chinese character, findable on a dictionary site like zhongwen.com. The two characters thus generated from each pair can be written side-by-side and interpreted as another single character. For example:

• gold = 金, name = 名; 金名 = 銘, which means inscription

All of these Chinese characters happen to fit a pattern: they consist of a radical on the left and a phonetic component on the right. The number of strokes in each character is given as (#s), and the length of the combined word is given as (#l). The characters are:

• gold = 金, name = 名; 銘 = inscription
• gold = 金, ten = 十; 針 = needle
• blue = 青, dispute = 争, 静 = serene (one of the characters used in the logo of the film Serenity)
• mouth = 口, beg = 乞, 吃 = eat
• stone = 石, wrap = 包, 砲 = cannon
• words = 言, shoot = 射, 謝 = thank
• bow = 弓, single = 単, 弾 = bullet
• words = 言, I = 吾, 語 = language
• alcohol = 酉, demon = 鬼, 醜 = ugly
• thread = 糸, winter = 冬, 終 = end

The first letters of these translations spell out INSECT BLUE, which is another such pair of characters:

• insect = 虫, blue = 青, 蜻 = DRAGONFLY.