Eleventh Anniversary: Steel

November 2024 
Stainless steel 

The traditional gift for the eleventh anniversary is steel. Not a common jewelry material, but then again my wife keeps reminding me that she doesn't wear a lot of jewelry and would like something that she'll actually use. A trivet seemed both practical and well-suited to the material.

My wife is a Scorpio; the date of our wedding makes our marriage a Scorpio as well so that seemed like a thematic starting point. At first I thought I'd make a trivet that looked like one, but I'm not sure I want to see that on the dining table. They're cool-looking and all, but not exactly appetizing (the deep-fried scorpion that my brother and I ate in China once as kids notwithstanding), so I decided instead to do something with the Chinese character for "scorpion" in an ancient seal-engraving script.

The modern Chinese word for scorpion, written in traditional (pre-1949) characters is 蠍 (xiē), but this was not the ancient word for scorpion. The original word was 萬 (wàn), which you will notice (if you speak Chinese) is the character for 10,000. At the time that "wàn" was the word for scorpion (Bronze Age, c. 2000 b.c.e.), there was no character for "10,000" but because they were homonyms, the character was borrowed for the number and now the original meaning is known mostly to scholars and pedants like me.

The great thing about the concept of 10,000 in Chinese culture is that it isn't just the literal number, it is also a euphemism for "a very long time"—for example, when someone sneezes, others might exclaim "萬歲!" (wànsuì!), or "ten thousand years of life!" 

All of the above makes it a great choice for an anniversary gift—may our Scorpio marriage last 10,000 years!