Why this word is great
WENYAN — [Noun] The classical literary language of China, used from antiquity to the early 20th century, characterized by concision, parallelism, and allusive elegance. From Mandarin 文言 (wényán), where 文 (wén) means 'literature' or 'writing' and 言 (yán) means 'speech' or 'language'—a tongue of brushstrokes, not breath. Unlike 'baihua' (the vernacular chatter of marketplaces) or 'putonghua' (the standardized speech of modern bureaucracy), wenyan is a fossilized riverbed, dry yet still shaping the course of thought. It is the weight of a single character pregnant with centuries of allusion, the scholar’s lamp burning over a page of stark, unpunctuated columns, the silence between lines louder than the words themselves—a language that demands you kneel to read it.