At the earliest time, "Feng" and "Sao" were actually abbreviations of two literary works: "Feng" refers to "Guo Feng" in the Book of Songs, which is divided into fifteen parts and is a collection of folk songs in various regions of the Zhou Dynasty, and "Feng" means ballad; "Sao" refers to Qu Yuan's Li Sao, which is Qu Yuan's masterpiece. Later generations used it to refer to all Qu Yuan's works, and "Sao" means sadness. "National Style" is the source of China's realistic tradition of ancient poetry, and "Li Sao" is the source of romantic tradition, so later generations use "coquettish" to refer to poetry and literature, such as Gao Shi: "Sunset urges calligraphy, autumn wind sends coquettish." That is, the feeling and happiness of autumn inspired the poet to write poems.
In the long language evolution, in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the word "coquettish" gradually extended to scenery, brilliance, debauchery and frivolous behavior. This is because with the development and prosperity of commodity economy, a market society has been formed in Ming and Qing dynasties, people's living standards have been improved day by day, and the pursuit of spiritual culture has been growing day by day. Coupled with the popularity of printing, a large number of popular stories began to emerge. At the same time, vulgar slang and unhealthy ideas in the market society have also begun to affect literary works. Specific to the word "coquettish", the semantic meaning of "wind" describes the love between men and women, and the semantic meaning of "coquettish" describes the coquettish in the slang of the vulgar society, so there are a lot of derogatory elements of "coquettish" in the popular novels of this period. For example, Feng Menglong's story "A penny gets a share" in "Awakening the World" in the Ming Dynasty wrote: "Although the old man is coquettish, he has to pretend to be an old man. How can he get what he wants? " In the Ming Dynasty, Liang Chenyu wrote: "I am coquettish, and the bridal chamber is most afraid of loneliness." Both contain derogatory meanings.
But at this time, the derogatory meaning of "Sao" is no longer used to refer to women. 19 At the end of the 20th century, with the west wind spreading eastward, women's subjective consciousness gradually awakened, and the word "coquettish" began to be used more for women. Mao Dun wrote in the novel "Shake": "Sister Jinfeng has come to the front, with white lead powder on her face, blushing lips, staring and twisting her waist, which is very coquettish." Visible "coquettish" has been used to describe women's dissolute and frivolous behavior.